In this paper we present p2pCM, a new distributed component-oriented model aimed to wide-area environments. Our model offers traditional component services like naming, activation, event notifications, and persistence on top of a structured peer-to-peer overlay. We benefit from the peer-to-peer substrate to implement these services in a decentralized and efficient way. The innovative contributions of our approach are a lightweight distributed container model, an adaptive component activation mechanism, which takes into account network locality, and a decentralized component location and deployment service. We focus on how the services provided by p2pCM can be used to implement essential computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) services, like shared session management, awareness and coordination policies, and show a sample application which uses them. We believe that all of the features our component-oriented model provides can be very promising for the development of future wide-area distributed CSCW applications.