Collanos Blog

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.

Boston — June 20, 2007 – Collanos Software was selected to participate in Enterprise 2.0’s Launch Pad. Collanos’ mission is connecting people and enabling professional teamwork on a global basis and beyond enterprise boundaries.

Launch Pad features companies that are demonstrating the release of a new product or service. Collanos is one out of four companies selected to present on the main stage during Enterprise 2.0.

Collanos Workplace provides an easy to use, p2p platform for team members to collaborate on projects using Windows, Mac, and Linux Systems, without the need of a server. At the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad, Collanos will preview its new integrated communications services allowing team members to collaborate via voice and video in addition to conversation threads, instant messaging, and notes.

Collanos Workplace offers small business teams, students, non-profit organizations, and other knowledge-sharing professionals, an easy-to-use set of comprehensive collaboration tools. Collanos’ global collaborative network allows internet users to easily form teams and effectively collaborate together on a shared passion, goal, or project.

Enterprise 2.0 unites IT and business professionals striving for a more creative, alert, and productive company atmosphere. This conference drives the exploration and adoption of collaborative tools and technologies, focusing not only on the technology, but how the technology works with people.

Julien le Nestour in his blog “Collanos: core Groove features for free” brought up some interesting comparison points between Collanos Workplace and Groove. In response to his posting I added a comment which I thought our blog readers would be interested as well.

Julien, an experienced Groove user, did a very impressive and thorough analysis and comparison of Collanos with Groove.

I just wanted to add a few notes about the ‘folderisation’ aspect of Collanos Workplace that he brings up and explain why we have chosen to place the workspace at the root of the Collanos solution and not create separate silos for each object type (Tasks, Discussions, etc.) as is the case in Groove.

At the inception of Collanos, our founder Franco Dal Molin was a dissatisfied user of Groove. Money wasn’t a matter, it was the user experience (as well as the Windows only snag).
When team-intensive knowledge professionals as ourselves engage in projects, we are dealing with more than just files and team members. Team projects entail sharing of content that can be in the form of communications (synchronous such as IM and asynchronous such as email and chats) and the content itself (Unstructured data as in Office, PDF, media and other application files and Structured such as in tasks, chats, notes, links).

Team members need to be able to share all these forms of content in the context of the project. What’s more, they need to be able to do this concurrently with other parallel team projects. As a result, Collanos Workplace was designed in a way that users can view all project/s data in ONE location. No separate tabs for each form of content. It’s all there!

Users typically think in terms of projects/workspaces and in their projects they can immediately see all the different forms of content that are available (more objects will be created overtime by Collanos and by opening our studio to advanced users) and be able to communicate real time or async with any online and offline member. The consolidated workspace view is where we see the improvement over Groove, not a shortfall. Users who are very accustomed to Groove may have an initial phase of transition to this structure but for new users, we find that the ease of use is really where we stand out compared to Groove.
The hierarchical structure of folders is also based on users’ close familiarity with Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, further accelerating their ability to ramp up on the solution.

We are always looking for suggestions on how to further ‘dumbify’ our solution and address the weakest link on any team so that the entire team embraces Collanos. We encourage our readers to send us feedback and help us improve the only successful alternative to Groove out there.

SAN FRANCISCO — May 24, 2007 — Collanos Software today released Collanos Workplace 1.1, a free p2p platform that enables team collaboration on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems without the need for a server. Version 1.1 lays the foundation for global team collaboration. In addition, several new features have been added, including a Central User Directory, User Sign In/Out, and Vista OS support. Collanos delivers increased reliability, speed, and overall performance.

Collanos Workplace offers small business teams, students, non-profit organizations, and other knowledge-sharing professionals, an easy-to-use set of comprehensive collaboration tools. Collanos’ global collaborative network allows internet users to easily form teams and effectively collaborate together on a shared passion, goal, or project.

With the introduction of the Collanos Central User Directory, users will be able to see and invite any other Collanos community member, even if they are offline. Collanos Workplace allows users to restore any previous version of team member contributions. The Auto start kicks off the replication process immediately after the computer goes online. With the new Sign In/Out step, on top of the existing data encryption and secure storage, Collanos adds an additional security measure to protect project and team data.

Existing Workplace users will see an immediate improvement with the overall performance of the application, and in the speed of content replication across each team member’s workspaces.

With this new release, Collanos Software continues to execute on its vision of bringing free, easy-to-use, yet powerful team collaboration solutions to millions of internet users. Collanos’ mission is connecting collaborating people and enabling professional teamwork on a global basis and beyond enterprise boundaries.

“Over the last few months Collanos has been collecting input from the thousands of Windows, Mac and Linux users to better manage their team projects,” said Franco Dal Molin, CTO and President of Collanos. “Quarter over quarter Collanos triples its users. From the new release we expect important acceleration for this growth.

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!.

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.