Doug Ross is chief technology officer at BadBlue and leads its development. A co-founder of Fastech Integration and former director of technology at Alpha Software, Ross played a key role in the development of the Alpha Four and Alpha Five products. The following Q&A is excerpted from a recent roundtable discussion regarding peer-to-peer in the enterprise.

Q: Describe the background of BadBlue and how it came to be.
A: BadBlue in many respects is the result of my consulting in several very large, Fortune 100, companies around the whole IT, knowledge sharing space. You know, in many companies, the theoretically simple idea of sharing stuff with others is incredibly difficult.

Q: How so?
A: Well, there's so many steps - work processes - that someone who wants to share something has to go through. Let's say you have an Excel spreadsheet with some interesting marketing data and you want to share it with team members. The status quo is to find a server where you can publish it, get access to the server, publish the content, secure it if it's sensitive, and then hope it gets spidered by some internal search engine. Then you hope others will be able to find it and use the data. Now, consider the fact that the instant you update the data on your PC that you'll have to perform some of these steps again. So the current state of sharing information is a double-whammy: it's difficult and inherently out of date. Thus, in most companies, it just doesn't happen much.

Q: And what's the BadBlue approach to dealing with this?
A: If you want to share a file internally, you mark it as shared and send the link to your colleagues. They can either download or view the file. Even better, say your team doesn't have or want to open all of these documents using Word, Excel, etc. Because those apps take time to open, suck up lots of your PC's memory, and then really slow down your PC. Users who surf to a BadBlue PC have the option of a "Live View" - viewing a Word document in their browser, or an Excel spreadsheet in their browser, as it gets rendered into HTML "on the fly" right from the source PC. It's really easy and fast.

Q: What about security?
A: BadBlue lets you protect content in a variety of ways. You can set up custom logins or even use existing NT security. With optional connectors, a central IT department can enforce a centrally managed security policy so that authentications and authorizations are consistent. Combine this with IP restrictions, peer-to-peer control and what we call "soft firewall" protection, and you get a pretty comprehensive picture.

Q: What's your perspective on peer-to-peer?
A: Our primary concern is making it easier for businesses to share information. Insofar as peer-to-peer can help businesses run more efficiently, it's very interesting technology.

Q: You've been a big supporter of the PHP scripting language. Why?
A: In PHP, we've got a scripting technology designed expressly for markup language and the web. If you look at other dominant languages - take Perl and Java for instance - they're really wonderful at what they do, but they weren't designed expressly for web development. PHP is taking off precisely because it revolves around the web. And since we want to support customization and scripting, we've built in a lot of support for PHP and it's the preferred scripting language for our reseller, VAR-types.

This interview is continued in the next newsletter.