1. A peer-to-peer collaboration system comprising a plurality of peer devices, each peer device comprising a computer system with a memory and a computer-readable medium having computer executable modules in the memory, the modules comprising: an activity program adapted to implement a portion of a collaboration session on a first peer device of the plurality of peer devices, the activity program establishing a local copy of the shared space and modifying a local data copy of the shared space in response to deltas generated as a result of user actions within the collaboration system at the first peer device and other peer devices of the plurality of peer devices, and the activity program generating a component update request in response to an action by a user within the collaboration session, the user action indicating an addition or update to the local copy of the shared space; a component manager that receives the component update request from the activity program and has a parser that extracts from the request URL information which identifies the location of a file containing software component resources for satisfying the component update request; a download manager that receives the URL information from the component manager and has a file retriever which asynchronously retrieves the file from the specified location and places the file in a staging area in the memory; and an install manager that asynchronously installs the file, wherein the component manager is adapted to determine whether the requested software component is already installed on the peer device and to selectively invoke the download manager based on the determination.