Collanos Blog

I am a paperless worker. As a consequence my MacBook Pro is my permanent companion. I only leave home taking it with me. Without I am lost.

Over time quite some critical data got stored on my notebook. But frankly, I not making backups as seriously as I should. There has been a permanent risk to lose data. Installing and using Collanos Workplace rapidly reduced it!

But isn’t Apple’s Time Machine explicitely designed for this purpose? Yes, I work with it, but it just needs to much time and I need to launch on purpose sitting in the office.

How did Collanos reduce risk of data loss for me?
I installed “Collanos Workplace” both on my my notebook and on my desktop computer - as described on Collanos Forum, each installation used with an own “Collanos Name”. Collanos Workplace does not yet allow to use multiple installations with the same user name. Hint: Register one Collanos name for every installation of Collanos Workplace you run.

On my notebook I have quite a number of workspaces where I share data with the different teams I am member of. In each of these team spaces I invite my Desktop Collanos Workplace user. On the road I open my documents and notes from within Collanos Workplace, rather than from the harddisk or from within Mac’s Finder. As soon as I change a file, it is synchronized with my desktop. The same happens when I am in the office. Collanos Workplace is permanently keeping my computers’ data in sync.

This background replication works so well that I do not really need any additional backup anymore. Should something happen to the data on my notebook I just reinstall Collanos Workplace and invite my Notebook’s Workplace from the desktop into the team spaces again. And a little bit later all my data is back.

Isn’t that cool? It is so cool that I do rarely launch Time Machine - as before Collanos but now with much less risk - and if I do so, just to backup my emails. I am convinced that in the future Collanos will even support me in this task.

When Email isn’t enough anymore

How do you organize your hundreds of emails? How do you find attachments? And how do you navigate and identify the relevant information in the response mail to the response mail of the response mail? If you ask yourself such questions regularly, it is time for a change. Time to use a new solution and to work differently.

Collanos workplace allows to work in teams without the need of permanently sending emails. Data is exchanged within the team directly. Workplace is the home of team workspaces, work areas for teams. Users invited to spaces work with team data and communicate with team members.

Stored team data can be manifold: Chats, dicussions, tasks, files or team notes.

And data exchange between team members does NOT need a server. It just runs on the team member’s computers on Windows, Mac or Linux. It works through firewalls and stored data as well as the internet communication between the team members is secure.

To be part of the global Collanos network, you only need to register at the first start and request a Collanos name for your installation. Registration and use of Collanos Workplace is free.

Check it out. Soon you will only use email to communicate with those people who do not have Collanos Workplace installed yet on their computer.

Wenn eMail nicht mehr genügt

Wie organisieren Sie ihre Hunderten von eMails? Wie finden Sie die Anhänge Ihrer eMails wieder? Und wie finden Sie vor lauter Antwort auf die Antwort einer Antwort den richtigen Inhalt? Wenn Sie sich regelmässig solche Fragen stellen, ist es Zeit, eine Veränderung vorzunehmen und mit einem neuem Produkt etwas ganz anders zu machen.

Collanos Workplace ermöglicht, im Team zu arbeiten, ohne permanent eMails versenden zu müssen. Daten werden innerhalb des Teams ganz einfach direkt ausgetauscht. Workplace beherbergt Arbeitsbereiche, Workspaces genannt, für Teams. Benutzer, die zu diesen eingeladen sind, können mit dort abgelegten Daten arbeiten und im Team kommunizieren.

Abgelegte Daten in einem Arbeitsbereich können sehr vielfältig sein: Chats, Diskussionen, Tasks, Dateien oder Teamnotizen.

Der Datenaustausch unter den Teammitgliedern benötigt man KEINEN Server. Und Collanos Workplace läuft für Teammitglieder auf Windows, Mac oder Linux. Er funktioniert durch Firewalls und die sowohl die gespeicherten Daten wie die Kommunikation über das Internet zwischen den Teilnehmer ist sicher.

Um im globalen Collanos-Netzwerk mit dabei zu sein, muss man sich lediglich beim ersten Aufstarten anmelden und für den Workplace einen Collanos Namen beantragen. Sowohl die Registrierung wie auch die Nutzung von Collanos Workplaces ist kostenlos.

Probieren Sie es mal aus, Sie werden das eMail nur noch zur Kommunikation mit denjenigen verwenden, die noch keinen Collanos Workplace installiert haben.

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.

Collanos Software wishes you a happy and prosperous New Year.

2008 will be important for Collanos and hopefully quite exciting for you, one of our thousands “pioneering users”!

Collanos Phone Beta:

We’re starting the year with the introduction of valuable new (and free) functionality!

In cooperation with our voice services partner, Translumina Networks, we just launched the first Beta version of Collanos Phone, a service with voice, video and instant messaging features. The Beta program will demonstrate the robustness of the new offering. We hope you will enjoy these great new features. Your experiences and feedback are highly regarded and valuable to us and the entire Collanos user community. Please check it out and share your opinion on our Community site.

After the Beta phase (should last a couple of weeks) we will launch Collanos Phone 1.0, including premium voice features, allowing you to be called from the public telephone network as well as to call team members’ phones.

Integrated in the Phone is a multi-protocol instant messaging capability, allowing you to use Collanos Phone as your instant messaging front end to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and Jabber.

Note: Collanos Phone uses the same “Collanos Name” and user profile that you have already created with Collanos Workplace.

Collanos Workplace 1.2:
As you may be aware, we recently launched a much improved version of Collanos Workplace, 1.2. After migrating the supporting infrastructure to this new version, it is now required for all users to upgrade to Collanos Workplace 1.2. Earlier versions (V1.1 and older) are no longer supported by the network infrastructure.

The next version of Collanos Workplace, 1.3, including the long awaited team synchronization functionality as well as new messaging capabilities, will follow very soon.

Both the new Collanos Phone Beta and Collanos Workplace can be downloaded from http://www.collanos.com/downloads. We look forward to reading about your experiences. You can be assured, while 2008 has just started, it will be an exciting year for Collanos users!

Top 10 lists are out. Analyzing the short tail of registered Collanos users per country is nevertheless revealing. The distribution of the countries is changing slowly, not really surprisingly.

United States is number 1 with 35% of the registrations. This percentage share is growing steadily since the introduction of version 1.1.

Position 2 is Switzerland with 12%! After all, it is Collanos’ home country and Collanos Workplace has a German version of the product. The share of Switzerland is slowly decreasing which actually is expected given the size of the market.

Not surprisingly number 3 is Germany with 9%.

Rank 4, 5 and 6 are Canada, UK, India with each 4% and Australia 7th with 2% as all are strong English speaking markets. These countries have shown the strongest growth percentage over the last month with India having the highest growth rate.

8 and 9 follow the top markets even without national language versions: Netherlands and Italy with 2% of registrations.

Ranked 10 now is China also with 2%. The introduction of the Chinese version has led to nice growth, not only in China but overall in East Asia. Many countries in that area are climbing up the list and are in the meantime positioned between 20 and 30.

And who is positioned to enter the top 10? 11 to 20 are Portugal, Sweden, Austria (Collanos needs some push in the German speaking neighbourhood it seems), Brazil, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Russia, France, Poland and Philippines.

It will be interesting to see the changes over the next few months. Since the numbers of registred users are still small the effects of launching new language versions as well as of the work of active Collanos Ambassadors and communities are strongly influencing the growth of the user base.

Great to see the number of Collanos users growing all over the world. I am glad to share these stats with all of you regularly.

As I write these words, the number of registered Collanos members stands on ‘956’. So what?!
Definitely nothing to show off with as the number of global team-intensive knowledge workers seeking an ad hoc (simple and useful, cross-platform: Mac - see latest review #1 and #2, Windows, Linux and available off and online) solution to manage their team projects is in the millions, if not tens of millions.
We already had tens of thousands downloads of Workplace 1.0 so what’s new here?!
The CUD!

We just launched this week our new Central User Directory (CUD), creating the first Global Team Collaboration solution allowing Wang in China to be able to invite Pedro in Nicaragua, Achim in Germany and Amanda in Iowa to share a workspace. No IT support, no servers (data is only on peer computers), no lengthy tutorials and no licen$e fees or restricted functionality. It’s free as in FREE. No advertisements and no hidden agendas. As we grow our user-base we will launch subscription-based premium features that users can opt into (‘Freemium’ model) so there is an actual business model, for those of you still puzzled.

The significance of 956 957 registered users is the fact that Collanos with the release this week of Collanos Workplace 1.1, has addressed some of the main issues that impeded some users from embracing Collanos for all their teamwork. No more. From here on with the boosted performance, security, speed, languages - hear the latest: [audio:nihao.mp3]
and functionality (check out our new Conflict Bin and Offline invitations- See Release Notes) it’s all up-the-hill.

Farewell triple digits and welcome in the four!

963 and counting.

Aug. 13, 2008 Update:
17′000 and counting.

Jenni Kommunikation commits to climate project by donating a percentage of their travel costs to myclimate.org’s climate protection projects. In addition Jenni Kommunikation is leveraging collaboration tools to cut down on travel costs and increase productivity.

Zurich, April 2, 2007. As of April 1, 2007, Zurich based PR agency Jenni Kommunikation started investing in myclimate’s climate protection project. Each time an employee of Jenni Kommunikation travels on business purposes by car or airplane, Jenni Kommunikation donates a sum of the travel costs to myclimate.org. In addition to the donation, Jenni Kommunikation is also using collaboration tools like Collanos Workplace or Netviewer to reduce travel frequency, while still holding productive meetings.

Since its launch on April 1, 1996, Jenni Kommunikation has consulted companies in various industries: IT and telecommunications, travel and tourism, and start-ups. In order to provide a high degree of customer support, and agility in reacting to market influences, Jenni Kommunikation has to constantly be in contact with their clients.

“Thanks to the adoption of collaboration solutions like Collanos Workplace and Netviewer, we can work in real-time with our clients without needing to travel to work with them. We can be just as efficient virtually using Collanos Workplace to share documents and Netviewer to work on documents in real-time. We have also been able to cut down on car and airplane travel, which helps reduce CO2 emissions,” said Urs Jenni, owner of the agency. In addition we actively contribute to conserve an intact environment by compensating for our remaining car or airplane business travel by buying certificates from myclimate. I am of the firm opinion that companies in our communication’s industry have the responsibility not only to communicate about role models but to live them actively.”

René Estermann, CEO of myclimate, is pleased by this decision of Jenni Kommunikation: “It is key for our cause that small enterprises also set an example and demonstrate their sense of responsibility.”

Myclimate, the Zurich based non-profit foundation, is one of the leading providers of voluntary compensation measures. The compensation of the emissions is achieved through projects protecting the climate in less developed countries. Emissions are reduced by replacing fossil energy sources with renewable energies and are implemented with more energy efficient technologies. In addition to the reduction of greenhouse gas, myclimate’s climate protection projects achieve a demonstrable positive lasting contribution to development.

More information:

Jenni Kommunikation
Urs Jenni
Sudstrasse 85/PF
CH - 8034 Zurich
http://www.jeko.com

myclimate
Kathrin Dellantonio
Technoparkstrasse 1
CH - 8005 Zurich
http://www.myclimate.org

About Jenni Kommunikation

Zurich based Jenni Kommunikation founded in 1996 by Urs Jenni is specialized on Media and Blogger Relations in consumer and corporate PR. Well known companies in technology, telecommunications and consumer Electronics trust in the expertise and the business network of the agency. Main pillars in addition are Swiss start-ups. Jenni Kommunikation covers all Swiss language areas and can build on a broad international network of partner agencies.

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.

Company: jc ebell research - Bern, Switzerland (HQ)

Members: Jackie Ebell – Founder & principal knowledge worker, Chris Ebell - Co-Founder & principal knowledge worker, Sigi Hauert – Partner & language specialist, plus other partners in a growing global network.

Team Context: Consulting

Team Background: jc ebell research specializes in helping European Union and Swiss corporations, governments, legal institutions, and programs write, translate, enhance, research, and edit their mission-critical documents to get the desired impact. The company specializes in many different areas, some of which include: bio-safety, security, technology, science, and digital content. Leveraging jc ebell research’s services, organizations can increase their chances of receiving grants, having their policies accepted, meeting their deadlines, and influencing decisions.

Team Challenge: Teams at jc ebell research need to be able to share, discuss, translate and edit time-sensitive, confidential, and complex documents with internal and external members across the globe. Most of the teams’ work is done remotely while team members travel to customer sites in China, Korea, South East Asia, and Europe. Being online all the time is not always possible for team members so documents, discussions, notes, and messages need to be available both online and offline.

In the past the company tried using Google writely, .mac internet drive, and email. They struggled with writely’s and .mac’s constraint to be always online when working on documents. Email provided offline access, but was not the ideal collaboration tool since countless emails were constantly being exchanged and finding the latest document version, team members’ comments, and supplementary documents was always a challenge. Additionally, being spread out across three different collaboration systems while trying to complete a document, made things even harder to manage.

jc ebell research decided to find a single collaboration tool that could keep the entire team well-organized, support Windows and Mac environments, allow offline access to project content and, was affordable. In addition, the tool had to support customer participation, ensure confidentiality of information and content security, and did not require additional costs as storage requirements increased.

Solution: Jc ebell research found out about Collanos through the web and since then they stopped looking for other solutions. Collanos allows teams at jc ebell research to create a workspace and store all the project’s notes, discussions, documents, tasks, and members in one location that is accessible also offline. Changes and additions made to a workspace would transparently get synchronized among team members. Working in the workspace was very easy to do and no longer required the use of multiple collaboration applications.

A member of the jc ebell research team shared this experience with the Collanos team:

While working on a project I was traveling from Zurich, Switzerland to Singapore in an internet enabled Singapore Airlines flight. Jackie a member of my team was in Adelboden, Switzerland working from a ski resort, while Sigi, another member, was in Brussels, Belgium. We all had our Collanos Workplace open and were collaborating on a customer project that was eventually completed somewhere over India. Collanos supports our non-conventional business setup and makes us more productive and profitable, while having fun.

With Collanos software it is possible for us to integrate our clients in an open environment if they wish. They have immediate access to the status of their documents in the process and they can give guidance at any time. It’s completely transparent. It’s the concept of open innovation.

Results: Collanos enabled jc ebell research to consolidate their collaboration tools into one system while allowing them to have the offline access and flexibility they needed to work as a remote team. The jc ebell research team is a perfect example of how Collanos can help consulting teams become more efficient without requiring them to change the way they work or spending a lot of money on collaboration tools. In the end, efficiency and reduced costs increase a company’s bottom line and these are the results jc ebell research saw with Collanos or in their words:

Since using Collanos we’ve been able to reduce the overhead load per work-unit by at least 20-25% which translates into a significant productivity gain.

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.