Collanos Blog

Vergiss ruhig den Backup!

Wer mich kennt, weiss: Ich arbeite fast ganz ohne Papier und ohne meinen MacBook Pro gehe ich nicht ausser Haus. Mein Notebook ist mein permanenter Begleiter. Ohne ihn geht einfach nichts.

So habe ich ziemlich viele Daten auf meinem Notebook. Backups mache ich aber trotzdem nicht immer so seriös, wie es sein sollte. Ich lebe täglich mit der Gefahr eines Datenverlustes. Die Installation von Collanos Workplace hat nun das Risiko eines Datenverlustes bei mir rapide gesenkt!

Wäre nicht Apple Time Machine genau für diese Aufgabe gedacht? Ich arbeite schon damit, aber ganze ehrlich: es braucht einfach zu viel Zeit und läuft auch nur, wenn ich es im Büro explizit starte.

Wie konnte Collanos nun das Risiko eines Datenverlustes für mich senken?

Ich installierte ‘Collanos Workplace’ auf meinem Notebook sowie auf meinem Desktop (ganz korrekt nach Anweisung vom Collanos Forum - je mit einem eigenen ‘Collanos Name’, so dass beide eindeutig ansprechbar sind. Collanos Workplace unterstützt nämlich noch keine Benutzer, die auf mehreren unterschiedlichen Geräten (Devices) mit dem gleichen Namen arbeiten. Also pro Collanos Workplace Installation und Gerät ein neuer ‘Collanos Name’).

Auf meinem Notebook habe ich verschiedene ‘Workspaces’ eingerichtet und lade von dort immer meinen ‘Collanos Workplace’ auf dem Desktop Rechner als Teammitglied in die Spaces ein. Unterwegs, ob online oder nicht, öffne ich meine Dokumente und Notizen, statt direkt von der Harddisk - also statt im Mac Finder - aus dem ‘Collanos Workplace’. Sobald ich eine Datei ändere, wird diese umgehend mit dem Workspace auf dem Desktop Computer synchronisiert. Und bin ich im Büro, dasselbe: ‘Collanos Workplace’ läuft immer mit und ist auf dem neuesten Stand.

Die Synchronisation läuft so gut, dass ich keine weitere Sicherung mehr brauche. Im Notfall, wenn meinem Notebook etwas passiert, installiere ich ‚Collanos Workplace’ einfach neu und lade mich von den synchronen Workspaces auf dem Desktop wieder ein. Schon habe ich alle meine Daten wieder auf dem Notebook.

‘Cool’ nicht? So ‘cool’, dass ich Time Machine kaum noch anstosse und wenn schon, nur um meine Mails zu sichern. Es geht bestimmt nicht mehr lange und Collanos nimmt mir auch dies noch ab.

Probiert es doch auch aus.

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.

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.

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.

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

To accelerate the adoption of our solutions, we focus of viral marketing activities on chosen groups that truly reflect our target audience. Our first “seeding” areas include MBA students and faculty at Universities.

MBA students spend most of their time on multiple team oriented projects, exchange large files and correspond about them frequently, have different operating systems and require offline access to their files. Sound familiar?

These characteristics represent what Collanos is all about and selecting this target group was a natural choice for us. Furthermore, many of us on the team have gone through advanced degree programs several years ago. Now, as we spend more time getting to know future users of our solutions, we realize that when it comes down to team collaboration solutions, little, if not none, progress has been made. It’s the same old email, file servers and random instant messaging. Time for change!

We are working closely with MBA programs at leading universities to prepare for the launch of simultaneous pilot programs. Some of these include:

• Boston University
• Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley
• University of San Francisco
• Stanford GSB
• San José State University
• University of Phoenix
• MIT Sloan
• IMD Lausanne (Switzerland)
• University of St. Gallen (Switzerland)

Several programs have already committed to the pilot and, based on an early demo of our applications, faculty and administration alike are eager to introduce our free solutions on campus.