Collanos Blog

With the escalating growth in Collanos downloads and active users, spurred by the amazing word-of-bloggers (Including: TechFold, Learn-Learn-Learn, Tao of Mac, Office 2.0, MacNN, Andrea Kalli and Communixx, to name a few), Collanos is excited to announce the appointment of FOUR new ambassadors (About the Collanos Ambassador Program):

• Christian Aglen, an ambitious young Norwegian currently residing in the U.S. and going to school at the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, has taken the reigns for the Norwegian post and will also act as an ambassador on campus.

  

• Carlos Gil, a professional Facilitator, employed by the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería and actively involved with large organizations throughout Latin America, has taken the post for Nicaragua and also volunteered to moderate our Spanish user forum. Mucho gracias amigo!
• Sherif Rushdy has been a devoted user of Collanos Workplace since the early beta days. Often I find Sherif in a remote outpost in Afghanistan or elsewhere syncing up his workspaces. PriAct, an organization he recently founded, is a consulting organization, based in Croatia, aiming to release human and organizational potential to create sustainable prosperity across the globe. Sherif has taken on the role to promote Collanos’ user adoption and awareness in Croatia and in the Monitoring & Evaluation industry.



• Nico de Vries, another young and enthusiastic groupie of Collanos, is putting to work his diplomatic skills on campus at the University of Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven in Germany. Nico has embarked on his technical MBA program and is using Collanos for his current Project Management class as well as other concurrent team intensive class projects.

Have you given thought about joining the Diplomatic Corps? Here’s your opportunity to help us grow our user-base and get more people around you to Think Out of the Inbox and use Collanos Workplace as the teamwork solution of choice. Email me if your interested in becoming the next Collanos Ambassador.

After a remarkable debut in Europe, Collanos is shifting gears to accelerate user growth and presence in the U.S. market with Franco Dal Molin, our founder, steering the U.S. ship.

We are seeing rapid growth in our U.S. user-base thanks to an unserved market of teams seeking an easy-to-use, peer-to-peer team workspace solution and the wonderful world of web search. Google us to see for yourself! We have also teamed up with one of the most creative PR agencies in Silicon Valley, PR 2.0, which couples nicely with our viral marketing activities.

Over the last few months and in the coming months, our team will be actively present at various events taking place in the Bay Area. We already presented our student friendly solution at UC Berkeley’s Haas MBA VCIC event, did a live webcast from Apple HQ to the MacLearning.org audience of our Mac friendly virtual team workspaces, showcased Collanos at the March SF New Tech Meetup, won a Sun Fire server at the STIRR Mixer event in Palo Alto and got our photo taken at the SFBeta and SFWIN events last week. For those of you who bump into us repeatedly (e.g. Stowe Boyd, Rafe Needleman, Nick Gonzalez, Brian Solis) hope we don’t tire you out too soon. We promise to provide you with the latest Collanos user anecdotes (See the latest Collanos Ambassador to Nicaragua) and a constant reminder of why it is so important to think out of the inbox!

Following very active engagements and a dramatic increase in Collanos’ user-base in Europe over the last few months, Collanos and Musala Soft, our Bulgarian software development partner, were awarded “Innovation Award ITK 2007 Office Organization ” by Initiative Mittelstand, a German initiative to develop small and medium size businesses.

The award was given following Germany’s reknown CeBIT conference. Other category winners to receive similar awards include Open-Xchange, Collax, www.salesforce.com and Joomla!.

Frequently I am asked by people not familiar with Collanos: “Is Collanos Workplace for me?”. My short answer is: “If you’re a team-intensive person then, yes”. The longer one requires further investigation, prompting the candidate user for more information about their professional and personal activities and whether or not they evolve around teams.

To find out if you are a candidate Collanos Workplace user, follow this “10-Step Am I Team-Intensive?” Questionnaire.

1. Open your email inbox after being away for a few hours or an entire day and clean out all the spam, personal emails, newsletters, RSS feeds and any other one-off emails. You should have now a fresh, filtered view of all work and community (e.g. group activities) related emails.
2. Remove (or move to a temporary folder) all the emails that are individual emails, not related to any team-based projects or results from work involving more than just two people.
   Checkpoint 1 – If you have no team-based emails, then you may not need Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace is a team collaboration solution. If the first two steps resulted with you not having any emails related to team projects than very likely that you do most, if not all, of your work individually.
   * You can still realize some secondary benefits, not related to team projects, that Collanos Workplace offers. For example, you can synchronize and back-up all your content between multiple computers (including if they are on different operating systems). If you have no team emails, skip to Step 9.
3. Group these emails, which should all be related to ongoing team-based projects, into one or more team projects. You should be facing either many emails related to one large current team project or several emails grouped into multiple team projects.
   Checkpoint 2 – The more team-based emails you have the more you need Collanos.
   * The more team projects you have the more helpful Collanos Workplace will be in keeping these correspondences (using Collanos communication tools, not email) in the context of your teams and not mixed up in one muddled inbox.
   * Even if all of the emails are related to a single, large team project, storing these correspondences in a Collanos workspace, using Collanos synchronous (Collanos Messages) and asynchronous communication tools (Collanos Discussions), will allow your entire team to benefit from more organized and manageable content.
4. Count how many file attachments were included in the team-based emails.
   Checkpoint 3 – The more files you have the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace provides valuable features that support file sharing, including being able to store files in customized folder structures; trace file changes; know who the last member to modify was and when it was changed; view and restore previous versions; drag & drop from computer folders, and more. Now compare that to an email attachment. Apples and pears…The more file attachments you have in your emails, the more you could have benefited by having them shared (Collanos File Objects) in a Collanos workspace.
   * In addition, since Collanos is a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) application, there is no need to take multiple actions to attach/upload files. Once you have a file in your workspace all other team members have it as well. Synchronization takes place transparently when you are online.
5. Estimate how many times you lost important emails that never arrived or got filtered out by spam filters.
   Checkpoint 4 – The more emails you lost the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace synchronizes team members’ workspaces so that all team members have mirror image workspaces at all times (so long as users are online to get the latest updates).
6. Identify who works with you on team projects. Are they within one organization? Are they able to access one central application, such as a file server? Are they closed in a secure firewall? Are they all using the same operating system? Are they all using the same applications? Do they have adequate access to the internet and broadband when needed? Are they on the same or adjacent time zones?
   Checkpoint 5 – The more dispersed team members are geographically, organizationally, and have different systems and security levels, the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos is built on a Java platform that supports all major operating systems so that users can be on either Mac, Linux or Windows. Collanos Workplace can be used both offline and online, allowing members to edit content when a network connection is not readily available (think Outlook vs. Hotmail). Collanos uses standard http and TCP protocols allowing team members to bypass rigid firewalls and be able to share content across different organizations. For example, when you need to share project information with a subcontractor, consultant, auditor or lawyer you can simply invite them to join the workspace.
7. Analyze the security impact of data being sent via unencrypted email and stored on someone else’s servers.
   Checkpoint 6 – The more confidential your content is and the more important it is for you to store it on your own systems, the more you need Collanos.
   * Collanos defers to standard internet protocols to allow direct synchronization of content between users without requiring data to be stored on our servers. Occasionally, when two members are behind firewalls that prevent direct synchronization to take place, Collanos’ servers relay the content but without storing it on our end.
   * All team content, sent over the internet, is encrypted using standard AES 256 bit.
   * Accessing Collanos Workplace requires a user login and password (this feature will be available very soon).
   * Collanos workspaces are stored on users’ computers in proprietary Collanos databases that cannot be accessed via any other application. Even if someone got access to your computer, he/she would need to open Collanos to access your team content. For example, a MS Word document, stored in a workspace, can only be opened via Collanos.
8. Calculate the time spent and total costs associated with alternative collaboration applications you are currently using or planning to use along with the related service costs needed to setup, run and support these applications.
   Checkpoint 7 – The more time and money you are spending on costly applications and the services and support required to maintain them, the more you can benefit from using Collanos.
   * Collanos Workplace is very easy to install and use without the need of any IT support, allowing the creation of instant, ad hoc teams. Since content is only on users’ computers, there are no servers to set-up and maintain.
   * The base version is free of charge and has no limitations as far as content and members. You will have the option to subscribe (no license fees) to premium features as they become available later this year.
9. Repeat these steps for a couple more days, if you weren’t able to get conclusive evidence that Collanos Workplace will significantly benefit your teamwork.
10. Install Collanos Workplace to see for yourself how easy it is to ‘think out of the inbox’.

Summary
To conclude, this test highlights the fact that candidate Collanos Workplace users are extremely prevalent these days as we become more and more dependent on other knowledge-sharing professionals to complete our own work.
With most people deferring to email as the main collaboration tool for their teamwork there is great potential to realize by switching over to Collanos Workplace. The more team-intensive a candidate user is the more likely Collanos will boost his/her teams’ productivity, save costs, provide more security and make the entire experience of doing things together more enjoyable.

Looking forward to your comments!

For those who attended our “Think Out of the (In)box” event, here’s a recap with some of the ‘best of’ video clips captured during the live webcast.

For those who missed it altogether, no worries! Thanks to our sponsor, Translumina, we were able to broadcast the event live and are now able to stream it to you over the web using Veodia’s services.

Our moderator, panelists and energetic audience provided a great discussion on fundamental issues facing teams seeking solutions to support their collaboration needs.
Here are some of the questions that were addressed during the event:

• What is the difference between groups and teams and, respectively, group-work and teamwork?
• Why is email still being used in the context of teams even though it is not a many-to-many collaboration solution?
• Why are enterprises to blame for the stagnant progress in adopting more team-friendly collaboration solutions that will replace email?
• When is it best using synchronous collaboration solutions and when asynchronous? Who prefers one over the other?
• What are ‘high-performance teams’ and do start-ups qualify as such?

As well as some more entertaining questions, such as:

• Why does Dave Hornik hate wikis?
• When does Sara Beckman expect the Myers-Briggs test to be delivered online?

Discussion Highlights

On the topic ‘teams vs. groups’ that Sara Beckman brought up, Jane Creech provided some great insight on how groups scale up to become high-performance teams once the characteristics of teams become more prevalent.

Dave Hornik was quick to point out that start-ups, by definition, are high-performance teams yet they lack the tools to support this team-intense environment with the exception of ‘mediocre’ wikis:

I have not come across a start-up that has a software tool that really addresses teamwork in a meaningful way.

Interestingly, wikis have become increasingly a tool that start-ups are adopting…they’re horrible, they are purely about information.

In response to the moderator’s David Coleman question: “If email works best for one-to-one and sometimes one-to-many interactions, while teamwork is a many to many interaction, why are most people still using email?” Dave Hornik brought up the fundamental differences between synchronous and asynchronous communications and the demographics that constitute who prefers one means of communication over the other. As for himself, Dave needs sleep time and, therefore, async is key!

Collaboration works best when everybody is available and yet we’re all busy and running around so nobody is available at any given time. Email has become the best tool for asynchronous communications…I use it for that reason alone…We see evolution where our kids are more interested in IM and don’t believe in email…We need to find better tools that deal with asynchronous.

Who is to be blamed for the slow progress being made with more team-friendly collaboration solutions than email? According to Jane Creech, it’s the enterprise:

What keeps people from breaking out of the email cycle is that enterprises haven’t realized yet the power of team knowledge sharing systems and until they acknowledge the power of teams, email will be used.

Finally, for those of you MBA students still looking for jobs and missed our event, here’s another opportunity to get some insight on the job market prospects:

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.

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.

Allow me to introduce you to our first Collanos Ambassador, Christian Buergin, who is the first Collanos Ambassador to join the Collanos ‘Diplomatic Corps’.

Christian, who is in the process of completing his PhD, will act as liaison for Collanos on campus at his school ETH Zurich, a science and technology university with an outstanding research record.

Collanos Ambassadors are devoted users of our free team collaboration application, Collanos Workplace, who are seeking to expand the adoption of Collanos in their close surrounding. This volunteer program is intended for those who feel compelled to spread the Collanos word out and help us succeed in growing our user base.

Initially we are seeking qualified ambassadors to introduce Collanos on global campuses via the Campus Ambassador program to be followed by ambassadors for our Industry and Country Ambassador programs.

If you are interested in joining forces and becoming an ambassador, please email me: gil.heimanATCollanosDotcom