Collanos Blog

Just three days away from our inaugural event of Collanos’ foray into global MBA programs and things are really picking up. In response to increased interest from Collanos users and other parties, we have decided to do a LIVE webcast of the event with the support of Veodia, another kool Bay Area company (we’re not the only new kool-kid on the block).

In the meantime, our panelists have been busy gearing up with some memorable phrases and quotes on team collaboration. In response to my request for a one-liner on their thoughts on team collaboration this is what our experts had to say:

As the father of 4 small children, nothing is more important to me than team collaboration. Alas, no matter how much I nag, my kids refuse to update the homework wiki. I really should force them all to use their Blackberry’s. Particularly my 5 year old. He’s such a luddite. (Dave Hornik)

35% of the lessons learned in our class surround the cross-disciplinary nature of the innovation experience. Given that the class focuses on the innovation process and not on team dynamics, there must be something to the team collaboration thing. (Sara Beckman)

Often the coordination of a geographically distributed team is like herding virtual cats in Second Life!” (David Coleman)

Want to get some more insightful tips from these diverse panelists? Come join us on February 6 in person or via webcast (link to be provided soon).

…and for those of you, like me, who don’t know what a luddite is, click here.

We just picked up an interesting poll, run by Rod Boothby, asking users to vote for

tools that could be used by a large company to create a readable and writeable Intranet

Collanos Workplace seems to be faring pretty well! If nothing else, the poll provides a good shortlist of strong players in the business.

The question is quite interesting and not a trivial one. Although plenty has been written about it, I was not able to find a Wikipedia definition for “read/write web”, let alone “read/write intranet”.

Someone will have to start an article about it!

Just several weeks after announcing our first Campus Ambassador, we are proud to announce the appointment of Collanos’ first Industry Ambassador, Ambassador Mark Cupitt.

Mark, an Ozzie living in Philippines, has worked in software development for over 25 years with companies such as GE Information Services (GEIS) and P&O Shipping. Currently he owns and manages a 52-employee business that manufactures and refurbishes aircrafts in the Philippines and, very soon, also in Thailand.

Many of his employees are concurrently engaged in multiple team projects, sharing designs, budgets, proposals and other critical documents with other employees as well as with external companies.

To better serve their communication and collaboration needs, which were entirely based on Skype and email, Mark decided that Peer-to-Peer was the way to go:

In Asia, we are still subject to internet, power and telephone outages, where a centralized server causes more grief than it is worth. Out here in the Philippines and other developing countries, the unreliability of the services makes P2P (Peer to Peer) the only really viable option. We basically have given up using our central server. I have two web servers that we cannot get to work for a lot of the time due to infrastructure failures on networks and power outages.

Having read about the Collanos Ambassador program on our web site, Mark decided to take on the role as an ambassador to help promote our solutions within the Aviation industry as well as in other industries in the Philippines. As of this, Mark will also be carrying also the role of Country Ambassador to Philippines.

Congratulations Mark!

As part of our community activities and the official launch of pilot programs across global MBA programs, we are hosting a panel discussion, open to the public, on February 6, in downtown San Francisco. Below is some general information on the event and on our web site you will find more details, including a link to RSVP.

Event: Think Out of the (In)box: Team-intensive collaboration solutions from an MBA perspective

Date: February 6, 2007, 6:30-9:00PM

Location: Swissnex, Montgomery 730, San Francisco, CA, 94111

Overview: Join MBA alumni and faculty members for a panel-lead discussion on the topic of new trends in team collaboration technologies. Leading Bay Area academics and industry experts will lead a discussion on state of the art collaboration solutions and social trends that support knowledge-intensive team projects from an MBA student’s perspective.

Panelists: Well-balanced panel of professionals, academics and analysts on team collaboration. Panelists include from the academia Dr. Homa Bahrami and Sara Beckman (Haas, UC Berkeley), Micah Siegel (Consulting Professor in Stanford and Managing Director C2C), venture capitalist Dave Hornik (August Capital), and the moderator, David Coleman (Collaborative Strategies), an industry specialist in the field of collaboration.

Team: PURE SWISS Inc. – San Francisco, CA, USA (HQ).

Members: Managing partners Alex Fries, Jim Heim and Michael Toedtli. Worldwide team located in California, Mexico, India and China.

Team Context: Consumer Goods

Team Background: PURE SWISS is a manufacturer and distributor of bottled Swiss mineral water. The company was founded in September 2006 with the goal to provide a new brand of top quality, unique, and fresh mineral water straight from Switzerland’s alpine highlands. PURE SWISS has uniquely positioned itself as the primary distributor of Swiss mineral water to consumers around the world, whose demand for mineral water continues to boom with some countries annual demand increasing by as much as 10% annually.

Team Challenge: PURE SWISS struggled to find adequate collaboration tools that would support its geographically dispersed team members and outsourcing partners. Team members and partners were based out of remote locations around the world, utilized different operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac, and lacked the IT resources that are so readily available at larger companies.

In addition, the company is highly dependent on designers, marketers and other external partners who need to complete critical and time sensitive tasks. Sharing files, assigning and executing tasks, discussing documents, and sharing information among PURE SWISS team members and partners needs to be easy, efficient, and quick. Available collaboration solutions required unwarranted administration overhead, were difficult to use, and imposed additional costs, luxuries the company could not afford.

As the company continued to grow, correspondences and file sharing swelled creating content chaos due to members’ dependency on email and online collaboration systems such as Yahoo! Groups. Email systems were not properly designed to facilitate team collaboration. Yahoo! groups did not properly support the needs of a collaborative business environment and required team members to always be online to access and add content. Additional applications, such as wiki’s, did not meet PURE SWISS’ requirements as Managing Partner, Alex Fries was quoted:

Emailing documents back and forward between the team got out of control. We were recommended to use a Wiki but it was too complicated for some of our members. It would be much easier if we had a “virtual, central” drive that we could share documents with our entire worldwide team.

PURE SWISS needed a cross-platform, easy to use, shared environment that they could easily deploy without having complex and costly installations and maintenance. Each internal and external member had to be able to get onboard immediately without the need to buy new computers or to have advanced technical skills.

Solution: The company initially knew what it didn’t want but it was only when they came across Collanos Workplace, which was recommended to them by a venture capitalist, that they realized what they really needed.

Collanos’ free, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) solution immediately addressed many of their concerns. Mac and Linux users on their team are able to share Collanos workspaces just as easy as Windows users. No training is necessary and the lack of excessive features in the application allows members to quickly master the fundamental functions they need, namely, managing the frequent changes to documents.

In addition, PURE SWISS is able to easily accommodate their partners without requiring IT support or the purchase of a server or hosted environment. Partners simply have to install Collanos and then be invited to a team workspace, where PURE SWISS members are already collaborating. Documents, discussions, tasks, and information are all stored on each team members’ computers, making the teams’ data secure, backed-up and always available.

Above all, PURE SWISS members no longer struggle to keep track and organize their teams’ content. Collanos has become the standard collaboration application across the company. Team documents are organized in Collanos and everyone knows where to find the latest document or where to go to prepare for a certain project or meeting.

Results: Ever since adopting Collanos Workplace, PURE SWISS members estimate that they have become 30% more efficient in their communications and projects that require the exchange and collaboration on documents. About 75% of a PURE SWISS team member’s time is spent on joint projects, therefore, Collanos has had a huge impact on the way PURE SWISS and its partners collaborate. PURE SWISS was able to reduce email exchanges significantly and Collanos has allowed members to rapidly access all team correspondences and files without losing any critical data. Also, the company originally planned to license another P2P solution, but with Collanos, they were able to avoid these costs, get users onboard much faster, and share workspaces also with their Mac and Linux-based members, as Alex Fries highlighted:

We originally planned to license Groove Networks ™; however, with Collanos Workplace’s more simplified functionality, we were able to ramp up the team much faster and didn’t have to leave out our Mac and Linux users. On top of that, we didn’t have to spend a dime since Collanos is free.

By increasing the company’s efficiency and lowering operational costs, PURE SWISS is able to shift more resources into expanding its presence in global markets and supplying customers with its natural Swiss mineral water.

Collanos Team Spotlight Series, a new Collanos community initiative, highlights each time a new team, who they are and why they have chosen Collanos Workplace as their team collaboration of choice.

If you are interested in having your team take part in this program please contact us.