Comparing Collanos with Groove
May 31st, 2007 by Gil Heiman
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.
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June 17th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Please introduce a calendar feature ASAP.
June 21st, 2007 at 1:00 am
You called for “Suggestions” on how to dumbify the solution.
I would love a search function. As tree grow, 2 people will put the same data in different places in a tree. (The main reason things like Google Desktop are a must have these days.)
No need to search inside files, but searching inside notes, discussions and titles should be sufficient.
Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Sam
July 9th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Thanks Sam.
In the works, a Search function that will span across all your workspaces, including in the structured content such as Notes and Tasks. Stay tuned!
September 5th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Hi,
We are working with Groove as well and we checked out the Collanos solution since we have some replication problems and the synchronisation is alway’s going via the internet connection, even if the 2 computers are on the LAN which consumes unnescessary all out bandwith.
The thing that is actually holding us back that the files can only be used via the Collanos workspace since there is no 1to1 relation with a folder on the harddrive. The files & folders are renamed to %randomcharacters%.dat
In groove it’s just a directory on a harddrive you add to the workspace.
That is actually the solution we like to use, since the application we use cannot read the “collanos workspace” only files and folders on the harddrive.
If the workspace files would just be files and folders on de harddrive, it would be a perfect solution for us instead of groove.
Maybe this could be an option in the future?
September 5th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Hi Ringo, thanks for your suggestions!
We do have a “mapping workspaces to file system folders” feature on our road map, but no release date yet. We are still in the process of researching alternatives, evaluating technical options and estimating efforts. If I am not mistaken, Groove differentiates between normal workspaces and a special file system folder workspace for Files only (it offers members/presence and a chat too, but no other tools). Keep in mind, Groove is a Windows only tool. These two facts make an OS folder-sync function relatively simple. BTW, there are many tools on the market that do just that: Syncing folders.
Our vision is to not restrict workspaces by content. With Collanos, you can mix and match any object types in virtual folders. You can put Files, Discussions, Tasks, Notes, etc. into the same virtual folder within a Collanos workspace. Compare this to Groove’s “a tool = a tab” concept, which leads to content fragmentation and loosing context. To support our vision, we are considering a “partial mapping” approach that will map workspace folders in/out to file system folders. Objects of type File will be synced, but at the same time the Collanos workspaces will not be limited. They could still contain additional business objects, such as Tasks and Discussions. So the sync process would work something like this:
OS Folder A < --local--> Space A < --P2P--> Space B < --> OS Folder B
This concept will work also across different operating systems.
Best regards,
Franco