Team - It’s Time to Talk
January 28th, 2009 by Peter Helfenstein
Collanos Workplace 1.4. integrates Collanos Phone’s voice functions. Three voice services are now available to teams.
1. Call Your Contacts/Members for Free
You can call any other Collanos user for free, if the connection can be established directly over the Internet. These direct calls can be set up in a number of ways. Generally, the command is contained in the context menu if you click on the contact or member directly. Sometimes you will also find a “Call” button in Collanos Workplace’s tool bar. When such a direct free call is established between two Collanos users, the Collanos Phone application will open automatically on both sides.
2. Call Your Contacts’/Members’ Regular Phone Numbers (Dial-Out Premium Service)
If you have purchased dial-out credit, you can call Collanos Workplace contacts and members on their regular phones. To do this, use again the context menu, but select “Dial-Out” and then one of the available numbers “Office”, “Home” or “Mobile”.
Phone Numbers in User Profile
Each Collanos user can set and change his regular phone numbers in his or her own user profile. Fill out these fields so that your contacts and friends are able to contact you even when you are not in from of your computer.
Purchase Dial-Out Phone Credit (Premium Service)
Dialing-out to regular phone numbers is a premium service. To be able to use this service, users need to purchase dial-out credit on Collanos’ secure web shop, using a VISA or MasterCard credit card.
Voice Box and Redirect Feature
Quite interesting especially for traveling users are the voice box and the call-redirect feature. Settings for these features can be made on the user’s account pages on Collanos’ secure web site.
Voice messages left for the user on his voice box are automatically forwarded to the user’s email.
Call Redirect redirects calls intended for Collanos Phone to a regular phone number, for instance to a mobile phone. Your team members and contacts will still be able to call you for free on your Collanos Phone, but the calls will be redirected to another number after a defined time. This feature is automatically available for all users that have a positive phone credit balance on their account.
3. High-quality Team Calls
There are two different kinds of team calls available in Collanos Workplace.
- The first is based on the central conference service and supporting up to 10 participants.
- The second is working between Collanos Phones only (no central server involved), but is limited to 3 participants.
The advantage of the central service is that conference call details such as “Subject”, “Description” and “List of Participants” are being sent by Workplace message as well as by Email to all participants. The Collanos Phone based conference on the other hand is directly calling the other two participants.
You can start a conference call by clicking on the button in Collanos Workplace’s toolbar at any time:
Central Conference Service
To establish a call based on the central conference service, use the first tab and fill in the form, such as:
- Conference call subject
- Conference call description (e.g. an agenda or the goals of this call)
- PIN code to protect the call
- Delay before the call starts (a good idea is to give a 5 or 15 minutes advance notice before starting)
- Desired participants
After starting such a conference call by clicking on “Start” button, all participants will receive a notification message, both in form of a Workplace chat message (system generated) and email notification. The email notification has one additional element, it contains a web link to automatically join the call.
Collanos Phone Conference
To establish a Conference Call that is started directly from your Collanos Phone, as well as the audio mixed on your local computer, use the second tab.
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February 14th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
[...] If you haven’t clued in yet, Collanos has cancelled the stand alone Collanos Phone. The download page now only mentions, “Collanos Workplace … now includes Collanos Phone”. The first of this that should have sounded bells off is a Dec. 16, 08 email I received from Peter Helfenstein and Franco Dal Molin mentioning the extension of Workplace’s capability to that of video and audio based telephony. It didn’t mention the killing off of the softphone project, but that’s marketing for you. You can “read into” this change-over on Helfenstein’s blog entry from January 28, 09 entitled “Team - It’s Time to Talk22“. [...]
February 14th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Hello Maurice,
many thanks for bringing these points up. The interpretation that Collanos Phone is dead is wrong. We develop the phone as a standalone GPL product and integrate it as an external softphone as seemlessly as possible with Collanos Workplace. Prime reason for our development effort for sure is to make Collanos Workplace users voice/video functionals available. The installer installs both product but we keep Collanos Phone available with a standalone installer too.
Like that the phone in its most recent version is made available on hundreds of freeware download sites as well as it is distributed as a free softphone by telco providers.
Since Collanos Phone as voice/video extension is bundled with and interface to Collanos Workplace and users have to have the compatible, tested phone version installed, we decided to integrate both products into the same installer for the time being. We expect from this less support issues. Actually the same reason why we also include the Java Runtime version tested with Collanos Workplace with the installers for Windows and Linux.
Franco Dal Molin, Collanos Software’s CTO, will answer your points regarding Wengo and GPL. Collanos Phone is based on GPL and has Wengo Phone as its origin. BTW there is a new version of Collanos Phone 1.4.0.2 coming out - also as a standalone product. The Mac version of it is already included with the newest 1.4.0.2 installer ready for download as of today. It support now supports Leopard and Tiger.
If you have any questions do not hesitate to mail, call or blog comment us . You can also reach us anytime via Collanos Workplace
or Collanos phone. My user is “phelfe”
Cheers
Peter
February 19th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Hmm, you might want to fix the download link problem for the mac version. I´ve tested it on Windows and OS X.
“K boys and girls, the 1.4.0.2 stand alone is out. But I get a problem when selecting the mac version on my Flock browser.
When trying to download the Mac version, I get the following.
http://www.collanos.com/files/downloads/CollanosPhone/CollanosPhoneInstaller.dmg%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%9D%20target=
which does NOT result a dmg download, but displays a “Page not found” message.
I imagine, it should read,
http://www.collanos.com/files/downloads/CollanosPhone/CollanosPhoneInstaller.dmg
which “incidentally” does work.”
February 19th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Dear Maurice, many thanks. It should work now.
Cheers
Peter