Collanos Blog

Often I attend local Bay Area events where the latest and greatest Web 2.0 companies showcase their latest wares. One example is the ever-growing monthly SF New Tech Meetup, which is portrayed as follows on their web site:

Monthly Meetup to discuss and show-and-tell new technology: Web 2.0 to Nanotech, Digital content to video games. Cool new tech. Geeks, inventors, new companies with cool products and ANYONE curious about new tech is welcome.

Notice that the word “cool” is mentioned twice in this single paragraph. To be honest, many of the companies presenting at these events certainly fall under the ‘cool’ category. After all, we ourselves, Collanos Software, presented there earlier this year. However, is ‘cool’ the accurate criteria to be qualified to present at these specific events? Does ‘cool’ necessarily imply that this is also a promising company/application/service?

Wikipedia’s interpretation of ‘cool’ is:

…an aesthetic of attitude, behavior, comportment, appearance, style and Zeitgeist. Because of the varied and changing connotations of cool, as well its subjective nature, the word has no single meaning…and is often used as an expression of admiration or approval.

I can sense the admiration of attendees at such events but this still does not guarantee that a presenting cool company is on the road to success.

Last week I was corresponding with Scott, a writer and an active Collanos member who brought up a great point:

Let’s face it-this is an industry that tends to develop cool ideas because they’re technologically possible and then has to convince customers that they need these products.

So many of these ‘cool’ applications have not only been coded by brilliant engineers but also conceived by them. I guess the ‘code it and they will come’ attitude doesn’t always fly.

Scott follows up on his point and how it relates to Collanos:

Teaming is different. This is real-world stuff that helps people pull what they already do into one place, and provides added benefits, like tracking and project management.

Collanos Workplace, our flagship peer-to-peer solution provides immediate and significant value to dispersed teams at minimal (or more accurately, zero) costs. Our typical Collanos user, is someone who needs to collaborate on a team project with members across multiple organizations, does not have the time and resources to set up an enterprise-level IT environment and needs something dead-easy to use so that all team members embrace the application rapidly.

Such users rank ‘Coollanos’ high up on the ‘coolometer’, and there are millions of such potential users across the globe who may not be sitting in the audience of these web 2.0 events but are gradually getting exposed to the great coverage we are getting in the blogosphere (see latest: AWH Weblog, Stu Downes ): and the press (eWeek.com). Cool?!

In the 10th Annual Global Information Security Survey, conducted by InformationWeek and Accenture, some of the conclusions drawn from the data, gathered from over 3,000 US and Chinese organizations, are startling. A large majority of organizations feel just as vulnerable to security attacks as they were the previous year.

Although this survey focuses on large enterprises, here at Collanos our goal is to provide professional users (SMB and other organizations) with a true sense that their systems and data are in good hands and that with minimal resources (hey, Workplace is free!) you can reduce much of the security risks identified in this survey. As you can see in the chart below (drawn from the survey), viruses/worms, spyware/malware, spam, unauthorized employee access are the top four priorities on company’s security agenda.

Using Collanos Workplace all four of these vulnerabilities can be avoided altogether since Collanos workspaces are closed to invitees only. Your team decides who gets invited to these invite-only workspaces. Instead of using same-old-vulnerable-email to collaborate, users communicate in the workspace via Discussions and Chats.

Collanos does not install any spyware/malware on users’ machines (See Privacy Statement). You can create as many workspaces as you wish and invite only the employees that are members of the specific project at hand.

In regards to Customer-data theft (Priority #5) and Mobile device theft (#7), Collanos workspace data can be viewed only via the Collanos application, which is password (login) protected. If a computer is stolen, the thief would have to get access to the password protected application, otherwise, the data is plain gibberish. No team data is stored outside of the team members’ computers. Synchronization and storage is fully encrypted, using standard AES 256, and goes directly between team members’ computers when they can communicate directly in the network. Very often this is not possible because of Firewalls and NATs (Network Address Translation). In that case encrypted data is transferred through a relay peer in the internet outside of the peers firewall. These relay peers only buffer a small number of messages during the information transmission so the data is very fragmented.

The other concerns listed, for the most part, are vulnerabilities related to email, which again are not very relevant to Collanos workspaces.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still several items on our product roadmap that we feel are required to provide our users additional mechanisms to secure their data and systems. One example is extending the functionality of our Permissions matrix, so that teams can assign different levels of access to different employees and data. Collanos continues to focus on delivering an ‘enterprise-class’ reliable and secure solution that non-enterprise users can feel very confident using with one caveat, it will be simple and inexpensive to deploy and administer.

Often we get emails from users asking why we are not steering head on to the enterprise market. For now, Collanos Workplace is all about allowing our users to create ad hoc teams, very likely because they don’t have the resources, time and skills to license a SharePoint, Groove, Groupwise, Notes, etc (or ramp up their entire team on the latest flavor-of-the-day, ‘cool’ hosted collaboration tool, which may be cool but not enough to be adopted by the entire team).

As a result, the SMB market is where we have home advantage. That being said, often we find enterprise users using our application as it still beats the complexity of running some of the afformentioned enterprise solutions. Furthermore, Collanos bridges the gap of being able to collaborate on a team project with organizations external to the brick firewalls of these tight enterprise systems.

Below is a correspondence between our team and a user bringing up some great points about why and how Collanos can fit in the enterprise market:

“Dear Collanos,

…There are a few issues that would need addressing to enable this product for an enterprise, and I am not sure as to whether doing this goes against the ‘decentralised’ model that collanos uses. You would need some of the centralised controls. You would want the ability, for example, to limit certain people from inviting members from outside the organisation. Additionally, from an IT admin point of view I have concerns that I would not know what was floating around the business. In the standard client/server environment we can easily check which files are where, what they contain etc. Having a ‘closed network’ which is what peer-to-peer does, would mean that we would be blind in this respect. The lack of instant messaging logging is also of concern.

The issue of files being deleted / altered, and then users waiting to get them back would also be an issue. Again, in client / server we keep back-ups of all files on the server so it is an easy thing to get them back. I do not know how we would achieve this in a p2p environment. We trailed Groove before Microsoft had bought it and they seemed to address this issues by having servers in the loop - back-up server, relay server etc. I understand that with Groove now you can upload/download content to Sharepoint servers. This whole centralised modelling may be stepping away from the way you envision your product evolving though, although I actually just regard them as a ‘bigger client’ in the loop.

What we were looking for was a simple way for certain teams to work together better. We are currently implementing Lotus Notes as our email system and that obviously has very strong collaboration functionality. However, it does require initial set-up and ongoing maintenance by IT - your type of product is a very quick way to get keep everything in the one place and just ‘work’.

Maybe you could enable your product to sync with a Lotus Domino server like Groove does with Sharepoint? This would certainly help address many of the issues above.
Collanos Member”

Collanos’ response:

“Dear Collanos Member,

Many thanks for the in-depth comments. I understand you points very well. As I mentioned in our first email, we are really targeting a more ad-hoc teamwork environment. Very valuable enterprise needs are as such second priority to what you call to an extent the “simple way for certain teams to work together better”, fast, ad-hoc without administrative hurdles. The price we pay at the moment is that we cannot fulfill typical enterprise needs.

The idea of to be an extension to Lotus reaching beyond the Enterprise came up several times, not only from us. It could make a lot of sense.

We are working on closing some of the enterprise gaps though. Instant messaging will be improved and stored. We are looking at integrating with server peers that will allow back-up and potentially can store a superset of team Workplace data. And to improve Identity Management and the recognition of users is something that we will need to address.

At the moment we are positioned differently and I think that we can create a lot of value for ad-hoc teams working together professionally with Collanos, more professional than using just email to support document-rich inter-company processes.

I am very glad to keep you posted on all our plans and new deliveries. Our goal is clearly through the “consumer” to play more and more a role in the enterprise. Feedback like yours is invaluable for us. If you still see areas where in the context of your business a process can be supported successfully with a collaborative solution like Collanos, we will be glad to learn about it. I think that Collanos also has a role in helping people to improve their work culture to share with their teams and to reuse. From there they can move up into the enterprise-class collaboration league. My experience is that it is most of the time more about cultural barriers than missing technology if collaboration fails.

Many thanks.

Collanos “

Would be very interested in getting your comments on this topic. You can respond directly to this posting or on the related board on our user forum.

Nothing like starting the today with a new great review of our product. Actually, there were two great blog postings by two different users who work for the same company AWH Weblog.

Brent and Jesse submitted their objective (truly unbiased) review of Collanos Workplace, including some cons, which we are always welcoming so that we can further improve our products. What’s more, Jesse even provided a step-by-step installation guide for those of you first installing our peer-to-peer based team workspaces solution. Brent brings up some very valid points:

“Personally I was excited to test this product because I feel workplace communication and collaboration is weak in most companies…finding a product to help the process without adding extra work has been a challenge, until now…”

Collaboration adoption is extremely weak at non-enterprise companies (even enterprise adoption can be argued)…simply since we always default to same old out-of-context email. Organizing your content around team workspaces/projects is the fundamental value Collanos provides. Once you ‘think out of the inbox’, it’s hard to fall back to email when working on future team-based projects.

Brent also highlights a key Collanos differentiator, separating us from the many hosted team collaboration solutions currently out there, comparing the client vs. browser experience:

“…honestly I found the interoperability via a client much better than most online collaboration tools I have used…As well I found the overall interface well thought out and enjoyable to use.”

The reason being that with a rich client you get a rich experience, something you are so familiar with from other client applications such as Windows Explorer/Finder, folder navigation, Instant Messengers, etc. granting you immediate comprehension of the Collanos application with zero training required.

The work-offline advantages of Collanos are a no-brainer for those of us even with 10% network downtime throughout the day. The user interface and experience are just as important to get full team adoption, embracing the least tech-savvy member of the team. Otherwise, it’s back to email…

Areas for improvement, such as better permission management and hosted workspaces are already in the works (as is VoIP integration, calendaring and more) but we always like to hear from our users what is their most burning requirements (See related board on our user forum).

We applause Brent and Jesse’s thorough analysis and review of Collanos Workplace and encourage others to follow suit and share with the entire Collanos community how to make the best of Collanos and let us know where we can improve.

Check out the great free resources the organizer of the Enterprise 2.0 conference has just made available online. You will find great keynote videos, photos, podcasts, speaker slides, and more.

Following very active engagements and a dramatic increase in Collanos’ user-base in Europe over the last few months, Collanos and Musala Soft, our Bulgarian software development partner, were awarded “Innovation Award ITK 2007 Office Organization ” by Initiative Mittelstand, a German initiative to develop small and medium size businesses.

The award was given following Germany’s reknown CeBIT conference. Other category winners to receive similar awards include Open-Xchange, Collax, www.salesforce.com and Joomla!.

Frequently I am asked by people not familiar with Collanos: “Is Collanos Workplace for me?”. My short answer is: “If you’re a team-intensive person then, yes”. The longer one requires further investigation, prompting the candidate user for more information about their professional and personal activities and whether or not they evolve around teams.

To find out if you are a candidate Collanos Workplace user, follow this “10-Step Am I Team-Intensive?” Questionnaire.

1. Open your email inbox after being away for a few hours or an entire day and clean out all the spam, personal emails, newsletters, RSS feeds and any other one-off emails. You should have now a fresh, filtered view of all work and community (e.g. group activities) related emails.
2. Remove (or move to a temporary folder) all the emails that are individual emails, not related to any team-based projects or results from work involving more than just two people.
   Checkpoint 1 – If you have no team-based emails, then you may not need Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace is a team collaboration solution. If the first two steps resulted with you not having any emails related to team projects than very likely that you do most, if not all, of your work individually.
   * You can still realize some secondary benefits, not related to team projects, that Collanos Workplace offers. For example, you can synchronize and back-up all your content between multiple computers (including if they are on different operating systems). If you have no team emails, skip to Step 9.
3. Group these emails, which should all be related to ongoing team-based projects, into one or more team projects. You should be facing either many emails related to one large current team project or several emails grouped into multiple team projects.
   Checkpoint 2 – The more team-based emails you have the more you need Collanos.
   * The more team projects you have the more helpful Collanos Workplace will be in keeping these correspondences (using Collanos communication tools, not email) in the context of your teams and not mixed up in one muddled inbox.
   * Even if all of the emails are related to a single, large team project, storing these correspondences in a Collanos workspace, using Collanos synchronous (Collanos Messages) and asynchronous communication tools (Collanos Discussions), will allow your entire team to benefit from more organized and manageable content.
4. Count how many file attachments were included in the team-based emails.
   Checkpoint 3 – The more files you have the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace provides valuable features that support file sharing, including being able to store files in customized folder structures; trace file changes; know who the last member to modify was and when it was changed; view and restore previous versions; drag & drop from computer folders, and more. Now compare that to an email attachment. Apples and pears…The more file attachments you have in your emails, the more you could have benefited by having them shared (Collanos File Objects) in a Collanos workspace.
   * In addition, since Collanos is a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) application, there is no need to take multiple actions to attach/upload files. Once you have a file in your workspace all other team members have it as well. Synchronization takes place transparently when you are online.
5. Estimate how many times you lost important emails that never arrived or got filtered out by spam filters.
   Checkpoint 4 – The more emails you lost the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace synchronizes team members’ workspaces so that all team members have mirror image workspaces at all times (so long as users are online to get the latest updates).
6. Identify who works with you on team projects. Are they within one organization? Are they able to access one central application, such as a file server? Are they closed in a secure firewall? Are they all using the same operating system? Are they all using the same applications? Do they have adequate access to the internet and broadband when needed? Are they on the same or adjacent time zones?
   Checkpoint 5 – The more dispersed team members are geographically, organizationally, and have different systems and security levels, the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos is built on a Java platform that supports all major operating systems so that users can be on either Mac, Linux or Windows. Collanos Workplace can be used both offline and online, allowing members to edit content when a network connection is not readily available (think Outlook vs. Hotmail). Collanos uses standard http and TCP protocols allowing team members to bypass rigid firewalls and be able to share content across different organizations. For example, when you need to share project information with a subcontractor, consultant, auditor or lawyer you can simply invite them to join the workspace.
7. Analyze the security impact of data being sent via unencrypted email and stored on someone else’s servers.
   Checkpoint 6 – The more confidential your content is and the more important it is for you to store it on your own systems, the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos defers to standard internet protocols to allow direct synchronization of content between users without requiring data to be stored on our servers. Occasionally, when two members are behind firewalls that prevent direct synchronization to take place, Collanos’ servers relay the content but without storing it on our end.
   * All team content, sent over the internet, is encrypted using standard AES 256 bit.
   * Accessing Collanos Workplace requires a user login and password (this feature will be available very soon).
   * Collanos workspaces are stored on users’ computers in proprietary Collanos databases that cannot be accessed via any other application. Even if someone got access to your computer, he/she would need to open Collanos to access your team content. For example, a MS Word document, stored in a workspace, can only be opened via Collanos.
8. Calculate the time spent and total costs associated with alternative collaboration applications you are currently using or planning to use along with the related service costs needed to setup, run and support these applications.
   Checkpoint 7 – The more time and money you are spending on costly applications and the services and support required to maintain them, the more you can benefit from using Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace is very easy to install and use without the need of any IT support, allowing the creation of instant, ad hoc teams. Since content is only on users’ computers, there are no servers to set-up and maintain.
   * The base version is free of charge and has no limitations as far as content and members. You will have the option to subscribe (no license fees) to premium features as they become available later this year.
9. Repeat these steps for a couple more days, if you weren’t able to get conclusive evidence that Collanos Workplace will significantly benefit your teamwork.
10. Install Collanos Workplace to see for yourself how easy it is to ‘think out of the inbox’.

Summary
To conclude, this test highlights the fact that candidate Collanos Workplace users are extremely prevalent these days as we become more and more dependent on other knowledge-sharing professionals to complete our own work.
With most people deferring to email as the main collaboration tool for their teamwork there is great potential to realize by switching over to Collanos Workplace. The more team-intensive a candidate user is the more likely Collanos will boost his/her teams’ productivity, save costs, provide more security and make the entire experience of doing things together more enjoyable.

Looking forward to your comments!

As founder and CTO, I would like to initiate a dialogue on our company blog about the technical aspects of Collanos’ offering. This article discusses the main limitations of today’s Workplace release as well as our ongoing activities to address and rapidly fix the problems. The focus is on fundamental platform evolution. I will not talk about business features or collaboration functions today. In my next blog postings, I will shed more light on other aspects like Collanos’ vision, product portfolio and feature roadmaps.

Collanos had been in “beta” for about half a year before dropping the “beta” label two months ago. We have come a long way, but the journey has just started. There are many exciting new features we plan to release to our growing user base. This post introduces some of the features we will release in the coming months.

Starting Out
In eight months, we went through a dozen of small releases, fixing nearly 400 bugs and issues. Don’t be surprised; this is software engineering best practice: quick turn around cycles and “perpetual releases”. We also added many features, and with every improved version, the number of downloads continued to increase. We are about to reach 40,000 downloads, and it is exciting for us to see that famous “exponential curve” (aka the ‘hockey stick curve’) kicking in.

Invaluable Feedback
A big thank you goes to our active user community. Your great feedback helps us better understand what works, what doesn’t, what you like and dislike, and what you miss. This blog post is a summary of the main limitations of our product and how we are addressing them. If you are interested in raving quotes and why users are enthusiastic about Collanos, you can find them on our web site. We have about 30 rotating quotes on the Products page, and new quotes are added daily – just refresh the web page regularly to see them.

Main Limitations
While we receive great feature requests and lots of ideas from users, many could be classified as “nice to have” or are subjective to a very specific use-case. Still, there are a number of issues that come up frequently. In fact, there are important limitations in our current product release that prevent some of our users to deploy the solution more widely. Here is the ranking:

1. User must be online to be invited – An invitee must be online, otherwise there is no way to invite this person. This limitation comes from our current “pure” P2P model with no additional centralized servers or “helper” services.
2. Conflicts can lead to data loss – If two users make changes to content at the same time, then one of the two will likely lose his/her changes. This is a limitation of the current simple “last modifier wins” rule. BTW conflicts cannot be avoided in a P2P system – only mitigated and managed.
3. All content must be received from its originator – The current P2P replication algorithm fetches data from the source (i.e. its originator) only. If the originator is currently offline, its new content or latest changes cannot be received even if another team member is online with that new content.

Near Future
We are addressing all of the above issues with high priority. Our goal is to relieve “user pain” with as simple and pragmatic solutions as possible. We could certainly think of very elaborate and complex “enterprise class” feature sets, but this would only delay the process. Our mantra in engineering is: Deliver great user value fast. In the near future we are going to ship the following features (in this order):

1. Central User Directory – This new central service serves multiple purposes. First of all, it’s a directory for our community so users can easily find other users regardless if they are online or not. You will be able to search by different attributes – much like current social networking sites. And no matter if a person is currently online or offline, you will be able to invite this person.

2. Conflict Bin – This simple “save my data” concept will prevent users from losing their work due to unexpected conflicts. If a conflict happens (again, this is unavoidable in P2P networks), then the overwritten (or even deleted) copy will be saved into the Conflict Bin of the affected user. From there, the data can easily be recovered. At a later stage, we might expand the concept and add support for file versioning. With this, users will be able to refer back to any previous document version.

What’s better? These two features will be rolled out within 3-5 weeks so stay tuned!

3. Improved Replication – Another major effort is going into bringing our replication algorithms to the next level. We are building in some advanced capabilities and intelligence like a peer’s ability of fetching new workspace content from any other peer who already received it, or fetching it from many peers at the same time. Other measures will include advanced optimizations such as measuring P2P bandwidths or dynamically applying priorities. It will also be possible to see how much data is left for transmission on a per object basis.

As you can imagine, the third feature set is a bit more complex to implement. We plan to roll out features gradually with the first set of improvements due in approximately two months. This second-generation synchronization will be the single most important improvement of the Collanos platform. The benefits for our users will be substantial. Users can expect faster replication times and higher transparency of what is being replicated.

And Beyond…
We have a bolder vision, and some of the building blocks are already on the drawing boards:

• Permanent Peer – This service will be an on-demand subscription offered through ISPs. It will boost your overall Collanos experience. Think of it as your other always-on peer that not only maximizes up-to-date workspace content, but offers backup, workspace management, and more.
• Web Workplace – This extension will come with the Permanent Peer. It essentially brings the Workplace to your standard web browser, allowing you to access your workspaces from any connected device. This flexible hybrid architecture will make Collanos the first seamless Peer-to-Peer-to-Web offering.
• Voice Services and Instant Messaging – We will integrate VoIP and more general instant messaging services with our Workplace very soon. The idea is to facilitate individual and team calls directly from the context of your various workspaces. Imagine a one-click conference call with your team!
• Multiple Languages – With the help of our user community, we recently added German to the Workplace and will soon add Chinese. More languages will be added this year. If you are interested in contributing with a specific translation, please get in touch with us.

I hope this information was valuable for you. Do you think we are addressing all the right issues? Do you have questions or would you like to see other topics covered? Please let me know what you think.

Gartner (NYSE: IT), the largest technology analyst company in the world, predicts Collanos’ type business model will become “the most significant trend affecting information technology during the next ten years.”

The Collanos’ type consumerization business model focuses on providing consumers with a collaboration platform that will allow internet home users, university faculty, small businesses, and inter-enterprise users to benefit from the collaboration tools that only enterprises have been able to provide at an expensive price to their employees.

By differentiating ourselves from other Collaboration vendors who require the use of a server, utilize a resource expensive development model, depend on longer release lifecycles, and have their own agenda that forces the need for further infrastructure investments, we gain a strategic advantage that allows us to deliver to the consumers the collaboration tools they need at prices they can afford.

David Mitchell Smith, Gartner Vice President and Gartner Fellow, predicts that our approach “will affect every enterprise.” Collanos’ approach is much like Wi-Fi’s, smart mobile phone’s, pc’s, voice over IP call’s and conference call’s, instant message’s, and the internet’s approach. Each of these was quickly adopted by consumers who benefited from the use of these technologies in their homes, families, clubs, and organizations. Consumers then took these technologies to work and caused the viral spread that later led to enterprise adoption.

Already in our beta offering, we see Collanos Workplace being not only demanded by ad-hoc teams, but by teams in the enterprise. Enterprise users refuse to constrain themselves to their current email and server based collaboration tools. Collanos, starting with its peer-to-peer Collanos Workplace, will soon provide consumers with a complete set of collaboration tools and like that create greater demand for Collanos in the enterprise.

Collanos prides itself in helping internet teamworkers and leading the evolution of the consumerization of collaboration technologies. We do not believe collaboration tools should only be available for the wealthy enterprise but should be available to everyone both outside and inside of the enterprise.