Collanos Blog

In earlier blogs like Disruptive Innovation at Work and Gartner Prediction Supports the Collanos Business Model I wrote about our progressive go-to-market strategy entering new markets for collaboration, and our starting point to ride the most recent consumerization wave across enterprise boundaries.

Two inspiring new blog articles and their discussion threads seem to confirm our approach:

• Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, in his blog The Black Wire and the White Wire connects a second ethernet cable to his business laptop kicking off an IT “civil war”.

On my desk at work I have two ethernet cables. One is black and one is white. The black one is connected to our corporate network. I use that one when I want to print things. I could also use it for Internet access and stuff, but I don’t because the corporate network blocks a number of ports, including those used for Skype and Second Life. It’s also pretty slow.

The white cable, meanwhile, is a standard consumer-grade DSL connection to the Internet, with nothing blocked at all. Our local IT staff installed it by popular demand, possibly without checking with headquarters (we love our local IT staff!). It’s fast. I use it all the time.

Consumerization of enterprise IT at work…

• Jason Hiner, Executive Editor at TechRepublic, in “The six consumer technologies that are destroying traditional IT ” explicitely sees p2p Collanos Workplace being adopted even by corporate IT supported by some pressure coming from consumerization.

That doesn’t mean IT should necessarily abandon P2P software altogether. It can often prove extremely useful and efficient. For example, Collanos software can be used for sharing and collaborating on documents between various users in a team or workgroup.

Disrupting the collaboration market outside the enterprise platform and being brought in through enterprise doors via consumerization seems like a promising new business strategy – not only for Collanos.

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.

David Coleman wrote a great follow-up blog to the LaunchPad panel he sat on in last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. (See recorded webcast)

As a member of Collanos, I can very much relate to the Ent. 1.5 vs. 2.0 dilemma.
In recent demonstrations in Silicon Valley we often find ourselves over-shadowed by cool Ajax-based (and SaaS) applications that are cool but often either premature for mass user adoption or not justified as stand alone applications. Collanos may be missing the flare of some of these cool applications but if ‘cool’ is the criteria to be considered a 2.0 company, we are very happy to be a ‘1.5’.

Collanos is targeted at users seeking an easy-to-use, affordable and cross-platform solution for managing all cross-organizational team interactions in the context of their teams (hence ‘think out of the inbox’ and why it’s ‘9* better than email’). Enterprises may not be at the forefront of our targeted user-base but there surely are many enterprise users who can use such application when they need to figure a way to get an external member of the team onboard in a shared workspace without needing to put a request in for IT to grant the permissions and make access possible. The thousands of early adopters of our solutions can already attest to Collanos meeting these requirements as well as serving other critical requirements such as ad hoc team formation, data stored only on user machines (no data on servers) and more secure data transfer.

Collanos addresses the pains of today and therefore may in fact be a 1.5 company. When the underwater cables went down in Asia a few months ago and users could not connect to the internet, users flocked to Collanos. When users lose trust in their data being stored on some remote server due to another major breach of data privacy, they will seek out P2P-based solutions such as Collanos. When users come to terms with their email Inbox being their worst nightmare and seek a more contextual solution, Collanos’ team workspaces will spur their interests.

I can go on and on listing the benefits of Collanos Workplace, our flagship solution (and yes, we still need to further enhance the application), but I will leave it to the readers, including the enterprise ‘2.0’ users, to see for themselves how 1.5 is greater than 2.0.

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.

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.

Dr. Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, said, “Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are generally cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use. … . Ironically, in each of the instances studied in this book, [Innovator’s Dilemma] it was disruptive technology that precipitated the leading firms’ failure.

It is very interesting to see how Christensen’s research is being further validated by the rise of up-and-coming incumbent internet technology companies who are now taking away market share from enterprise application vendors. Telecommunication, content management, customer relationship management (CRM), database, and portal enterprise vendors are slowly seeing their market share erode as smaller more agile companies are building technologies that meet 80% of the customers need at a much lower cost. Companies such as Alfresco, Liferay, mysql, and salesforce.com have all built products that are competing against leading vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and EMC.

Other smaller companies have selected not to compete directly with enterprise application vendors, but to compete with specific functionality in an enterprise application. A good example of such a company is Xing. Xing created a business network that allows business professionals to maintain and share their business contacts with others. Xing now has over one million members who share their contacts freely. Businesses have been trying to do this same thing with CRM systems but with little success. As Xing continues to grow and build its network, businesses have started to turn to Xing for assistance with managing their company contacts.

The Internet provides a way for small businesses to build a solution that either competes directly with enterprise vendors or with functionality in an enterprise vendor’s product. Both strategies are potentially disruptive to enterprise vendors. Today, expensive marketing budgets, unaffordable infrastructure costs, security concerns, and technology superiority are a lot less penetrable barriers to entry. Companies can leverage the internet to cheaply market their solutions, buy hardware and host their products at very low and affordable costs, and outsource and use open source components to build products faster and cheaper. Although security concerns are increasing, trust in vendor hosted solutions has greatly increased. All these forces, plus the fact that existing vendors are tied to out-of-date architecture and are delivering functionality for the most demanding user, set the stage for market disruption.

In the Collaboration market, the innovative disruption has started. Companies such as 37signals, Zoho, and Zimbra have build collaboration solutions that challenge the likes of IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft. Collaboration prices have dropped, and continue to drop, making technology more affordable for the enterprise. But because of their hosted architecture, that incurs hosting and storage costs, incumbent vendors have faced price barrier that have prevented them from truly disrupting enterprise vendors and serving underserved markets.

Similar to Xing, Collanos choose to first compete against a few specific functions offered by enterprise and incumbent collaboration vendors. Where more holistic collaboration solutions required a high degree of computer expertise, monthly costs to support hosted infrastructure, restrictive company policies, and closed networks; Collanos choose to focus on a basic collaboration functionality that was easy to use, free, and open. Selecting a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture was the innovation that has enabled Collanos to become a disruptive technology.

User feedback has been overwhelming positive. Students, small businesses, non-profits, and global markets have received Collanos simple but very innovative Collaboration solution. Users around the world can now experience the benefits of a collaboration system and a collaborative network for free. Thousands of users have downloaded and registered with Collanos. Daily teams have joined the Collanos network.

Collanos ambition is to provide its user network with a complete set of functionality that will allow them to benefit from the same tools that help make the enterprise successful.

Collanos aspiration is in line with Dr. Christensen’s findings, and according to Christensen’s theory, disruptive technologies such as Collanos who successfully start out serving underserved markets, eventually blossom and pick up the speed required to displace established vendors.

Collanos Workplace releases version 1.0.2 of its innovative P2P software for virtual teams

Zurich, February 8, 2007 – Collanos Software now offers its free cross-company, cross-platform collaboration solution in German.

Collanos Workplace allows teams to work together over the internet more efficiently, flexibly, and securely. They can access shared information such as contacts, discussions, documents, team calendars, tasks, and projects. Now, users can switch between English and German as Collanos takes the first step into localizing its global software.

“Tens of thousands of users have already installed Collanos Workplace on their computers, and every month we see a 130% growth rate,” said Peter Helfenstein, CEO of Collanos.

With offices in Switzerland and USA, Collanos expects to further accelerate this rapid growth with the German version.

“Over 25% of our users originate from Switzerland, Germany and Austria,” says Helfenstein. “With the German version, we will become even stronger in the Germanic region.”

Typical Collanos users are MBA students, small to mid-size businesses, non-profit organizations, and mobile work groups in large consulting companies seeking cross-organizational collaboration solutions. Users all commonly share the need for a flexible collaboration platform that spans several locations in order to optimize the workflow with colleagues, customers, providers, partners, and remote employees.

These users require that all team members have access to the latest version of documents and that all project-related discussions, emails, and other content are easily accessible in a shared environment. Since Collanos supports all major operating systems, users can always invite additional members to their workspaces.

“As a small company with globally dispersed employees and countless partners, we suffered from overflowing email inboxes and endless attachments,” recalls Alex Fries, CEO of PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Thanks to Collanos, we are now able to work as a ‘virtual team’ in a secure, structured environment, and in the context of our teams. Without Collanos, we would have had to invest in an expensive and complex collaboration system limiting us to a closed network.”

Reto Hartinger, a Swiss Internet expert and organizer of IT conferences, believes the free software has great promise, “Although Collanos is not yet as powerful as some of its older siblings, Lotus Notes, Sharepoint, and Groove, it will rapidly gain market share especially with innovative companies and collaboration within teams with high member turnover.” Hartinger also sees huge potential with lawyers, software developers, advertising and marketing agencies, and universities.

Peter Helfenstein added, “The German version was translated entirely by volunteers in our user community. This will happen with upcoming languages as well. Collanos will work with the community to maintain these versions.”

The software is available for free and can be downloaded at www.collanos.com.

Collanos Workplace 1.0.2 nun auch in deutscher Sprachversion. P2P-Software für virtuelle Teams revolutioniert den Markt für Kollaborationswerkzeuge

Zürich, 8. Februar 2007 – Collanos stellt seine Software für firmenübergreifendes Zusammenarbeiten nun auch in deutscher Sprache zum Herunterladen bereit. Die kostenlose Software arbeitet unter Windows, Mac OS X und Linux. Gleichzeitig baut Collanos den Marketing- und Supportbereich aus.

Mit Collanos Workplace können Teams im Internet effizient, flexibel und sicher zusammen arbeiten. Sie können auf gemeinsame Informationen wie Kontakte, Diskussionen, Dokumente, Teamkalender, Aufgaben und Projekte zugreifen. Die Sprachversion der Benutzeroberfläche lässt sich im laufenden Betrieb von Englisch auf Deutsch umschalten.

“Bereits jetzt haben Zehntausende Collanos Workplace auf ihrem Rechner installiert und jeden Monat registrieren sich rund 130 % mehr Benutzer als im Vormonat”, erklärt Peter Helfenstein, CEO von Collanos. Das rasante Wachstum will das Jungunternehmen mit Sitz in der Schweiz und in den USA mit der deutschen Version nun noch beschleunigen.

“Über 25% der Registrierungen kommen heute schon aus der Schweiz, Deutschland und Österreich”, sagt Helfenstein. “Mit der neuen Version werden wir im deutschsprachigen Markt noch stärker.” Collanos baut darum in der Schweiz auch das Mitarbeiter-Team aus: Zusätzliche Stellen in den Bereichen Marketing und Benutzerunterstützung werden besetzt.

Typische Collanos-Nutzer sind kleinere, innovative Firmen, mobil arbeitende Arbeitsgruppen in großen Beratungsunternehmen, aber auch MBA-Studenten, die eine flexible Kollaborationsplattform über Standortgrenzen, für das Zusammenspiel mit Kunden, Lieferanten, Partnern und externen Mitarbeitern oder für den mobilen Einsatz benötigen. Diese Nutzer sind darauf angewiesen, dass jeder jederzeit auf die letzte Version eines Dokumentes zugreifen kann und dass Diskussionen, E-Mails und Kalkulationen eines Projektes innerhalb einer gemeinsamen Struktur immer von allen abrufbar sind. Da Collanos alle Betriebssysteme unterstützt, können Collanos-Nutzer einfach weitere Personen in ihre Projekt-Arbeitsumgebung einladen.

“Als kleine Firma mit weltweit verteilten Mitarbeitern und unzähligen Partnern litten wir unter hoffnungslos überfüllten Mailboxen mit unzähligen E-Mails mit angehängten Dokumenten”, erinnert sich Alex Fries, CEO von PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Dank Collanos haben wir nun unsere virtuelle zentrale Umgebung und können überall professionell und strukturiert zusammenarbeiten. Das wäre sonst nur mit einer teuren Collaboration-Umgebung im Rahmen eines firmeneigenen Netzwerks möglich.”

Reto Hartinger, einer der führenden Köpfe der Schweizer Internet-Szene und IT-Konferenzveranstalter, gibt der Gratissoftware gute Chancen: “Collanos ist zwar noch nicht so leistungsfähig wie einige seiner großen Brüder, aber gerade bei innovativen Firmen und für die Zusammenarbeit in Teams mit wechselnder Zusammensetzung wird sich Collanos rasch durchsetzen.” großes Potenzial sieht er unter anderem bei Anwälten, Software-Entwicklern, Werbe- und Marketing-Agenturen sowie Universitäten.

Weitere Sprachversionen von Collanos Workplace sollen folgen. Peter Helfenstein erklärt: “Bereits die deutsche Version wurde von Freiwilligen aus der User Community vorbereitet. Weitere Sprachen werden künftig gänzlich von den Nutzern erstellt und gemeinsam mit Collanos gepflegt.”

Die kostenlos erhältliche Software steht unter www.collanos.com zum Download bereit.

The term Unified Collaboration is being used by analysts, bloggers, and reporters to describe the convergence of instant messaging, voice services (one-to-one calls and conference calls), web conferencing (presentation sharing, screen sharing, remote control desktop), presence awareness, and team workspaces (team workspaces, file sharing, discussions, tasks, calendars).

The belief is that the use of a single integrated tool that allows teams to leverage the benefits of all these different collaboration components will allow teams to become more efficient and productive. A recent survey conducted by AV Interactive, a video conferencing network supplier, “showed that 80% of respondents said that communication was the most important element to keep a business running efficiently and 75% agreed that collaborative communication technologies would contribute towards more productive home or remote working.”

Current Unified Collaboration offerings are very expensive, $60-200 per user - costs that only wealthy enterprises can afford. For small businesses, ad-hoc teams, and consumers the Unified Collaboration vision is very expensive. Existing collaboration platforms used to share documents require customers to pay for storage space, limit the number of workspaces a team can create, and limit the number of users a team can invite. Consequently, Unified Collaboration still remains a vision for these users who end up working with disjointed tools, expensive pricing options, tools lacking functionality, and restrictive collaboration platforms.

Helping consumers, ad-hoc teams, and small businesses become more productive and efficient is Collanos’ top priority. Starting next year we will release additional functionality to complement Collanos Workplace, this additional functionality will become our first step towards providing customers with a unified collaboration platform. We will start out by releasing a soft phone with an instant messaging client that will allow Collanos users to call and video call each other, conduct conference calls, send SMS, and instant message other Collanos users and contacts who are part of other instant message networks such as Yahoo, Google, AOl, and MSN. This first release will focus on unifying the instant messaging and voice components, which many analysts refer to as Unified Messaging.

Our goal is to then follow-up this release and enhance the Collanos Workplace and allow team members to easily click a button in their Workplace and start a conference call with all their team members. Also, users can right click on a team member from there team member list and choose to call, sms, video call, or invite a team member to a conference call. The introduction of this new unified messaging functionality into Collanos Workplace will mark the beginning of the Collanos Unified Collaboration Platform.

After releasing the Collanos Unified Collaboration Platform we will introduce a web conferencing offering. Once we reach this milestone, we will become the first vendor to deliver a complete cross-platform Unified Collaboration Platform that is designed and priced for small businesses, ad-hoc teams, and consumers. By leveraging Collanos Workplace’s peer-to-peer infrastructure, consumers will benefit from all the unified collaboration functionality, while being free of the limitations that many hosting offerings impose. In addition, all of the team’s data will be stored locally by each member, further insuring user security and privacy, which is unmatched by hosted providers.

Future releases of our Unified Collaboration platform will include tighter, seamless integration with Workplace and application interfaces that will allow integration with other solutions. Also, next year we are planning to add a team calendar, videoconferencing, and web-access coupled with the ongoing flow of new features that will build upon the unified collaboration platforms capabilities. We are determined and diligently working to deliver you the Unified Collaboration Platform. With Collanos Workplace being recently released and now with our upcoming release of the Unified Collaboration Platform, Collanos is leading the ‘consumerization’ wave that will shake up the collaboration industry.