Collanos Blog

As posted as a comment in response to a TechCrunch posting this week:

“It appears that TechCrunch is giving a lot of coverage recently on File Sharing, with many new companies entering this space. However, the effectiveness of many of these solutions is very limited in the context of business and even more so in the context of intensive team collaboration settings.

Imagine you are working with a team on a project that involves frequent exchanges of emails along with constantly modified documents (basically what many of us do routinely these days). Supplement that with ongoing IM and phone/VOIP calls and you have a labyrinth of communication, cooperation and collaboration challenges (See very interesting article on the difference between these) with critical content scattered across a range of applications and systems.

File Sharing by itself is great for exchanging simple media such as photos and music and even for backing up files, but when a team has to collaborate on a file (s), discuss, modify, approve, version, track changes, etc. there needs to be ONE, consolidated solution in place to make it possible.

At the enterprise level, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint are common solutions to address many of these needs, however, they are costly and complex, therefore inaccesible to those of us ad hoc users or smaller businesses seeking something simple and inexpensive. Web-based solutions are…web-based, therefore restrict much of the work from being done offline and require centralized (or hosted) servers.

Although still a few weeks away from launching the fully loaded version of our free team collaboration solution, “Collanos Workplace”, has set out to take file sharing to another level. Our Peer-to-Peer, cross-platform (Yes, Mac, Linux and Windows!) solution will not compete with File Sharing solutions rather with those evolving to the next level of P2P 2.0.”