Collanos Blog

Yesterday’s flattering review of Collanos Workplace on eWeek was more than just…flaterring. Tiffany Maleshefski, the author, highlighted the fundamental points that make Collanos Workplace one of the leading teamwork solutions in the market.
The review’s title:

Collanos Collaboration Software Simplifies Teamwork

hits right on the mark on Collanos’ main differentiator from other P2P solutions such as Groove (now Microsoft) and any of the many hosted solutions available these days. Collanos simplifies teamwork. Period!

Her opening line immediately addresses our main ‘competitor’, email:

no disputing that e-mail is, at best, a mediocre tool for conducting ad hoc collaboration.

‘Think Out of the Inbox’, our company’s tagline, was chosen for that same reason. We all fall to the trap of using team-unfriendly email even when we need a solution that is more in the context of teams and team projects.

But how do we simplify teamwork? We make it more accessible to the average Joe, Jane, Xian (Yes, also in Chinese language!), Christian and Jolanda. No servers, no IT support, no OS limitations as she states:

Companies out to find a better way to work together without having to roll out a server-based collaboration product or impose particular operating system requirements on potential team members may find what they’re looking for in Collanos Software’s Collanos Workplace 1.1….Collanos Workplace 1.1 can spell relief for IT managers too pressed for time to evaluate, deploy and maintain a server-based collaboration platform.

Simplification is more than just for IT managers (actually, no IT managers required with Collanos in most user settings). It’s the users who find an intuitive, easy-to-use and no training required experience once installing the application and accessing their workspaces:

Collanos Workplace 1.1’s capabilities for rounding up the files, folders and discussions that comprise collaborative projects into single, easily accessible and well-synchronized spaces…we found it much easier [than Groove] to get down to business with the core functionality that Collanos does offer. In our opinion, getting a solid grip on Groove requires a more rigorous employee training than what’s required for Collanos.

Just to be fair, I didn’t post here some of the few ‘less flattering’ comments Tiffany mentioned about the product but these were actually more constructive comments than critiques that we are already addressing in the coming releases.

Collanos provides enterprise-class team workspace solutions for non-enterprise users. Since you are reading this blog, I am confident that you can use something better than email to manage all team content. Next time you click on the “Send” button of an email, think twice if this could have been done differently…or perhaps more simplified.

A while ago we were invited to Apple HQ in Cupertino to record a webcast demonstration of Collanos Workplace for the Mac Learning community.

MacLearning is a community of professional educators, technologists, developers and change agents dedicated to transforming learning through innovation.

The recording was made available using iTunes U, a free, hosting service for colleges and universities that provides easy access to their educational content.

You can view the webcast on the Mac Learning site with iTunes or more simply here below thanks to our streaming video services provider, veodia.

Thought our blog readers would be interested in reading the latest Collanos Momentum Newsletter we sent out via email last week to the Collanos community:

“Since our last Collanos Momentum Newsletter in October 2006 we progressed well towards our goal of becoming a “one million users teamwork internet platform” by the end of 2008. Here’s a short update on our latest milestones:

Collanos’ management and financial foundation has been reinvigorated with the addition of Andreas Danuser, as a major investor and board member. Andreas is a successful serial entrepreneur (Inalp Networks, SwissQual, NetModule, CTModule, Comitas and Translumina) who brings all his VoIP competence into our company.
We are now working on the next investment round, which will allow us to switch gears, further enhancing our offering and, most importantly, solidifying our global structure and reach!

Collanos Workplace, our flagship solution, has matured a lot. On December 14th, 2006, after a six months beta phase, we launched Collanos Workplace 1.0. On February 8th, 2007 we released an important update making it available also in the German language.
Finally, last week, on May 14th, 2007 we launched Collanos Workplace 1.1, our newest version adding new key functionality to the product. Now users can find and invite other Collanos members and team workers around the world, even if they are offline. We also added the ability to restore older document versions of the team at any time. In addition Collanos supports now a third language – Chinese. After English and German this will allow us to increase our user base in the fastest growing internet market.

Since February we further broadened Collanos’ global PR reach. Our head agency, Jenni Kommunikation in Switzerland, was complemented with PR agencies in the United States (FutureWork PR – specializing in social media PR) and Germany (100zehn). This increased the effectiveness of our PR work in these countries very notably.
Just the fact that at CeBIT we were awarded with the “Office Organization Innovation Prize 2007” increased our visibility all over Europe!

Collanos’ user base has grown substantially with nearly 10,000 registrations just on our own website. We estimate the downloads on more than 1000 freeware download sites to be at least 5 times that number!
Using Collanos Workplace 1.1, you can now see for yourself how many users have registered with Collanos.

The growth of Collanos’ user base is fueled by successful use-cases and teams. We started to document these stories and role models, including: JC eBell, Pure Swiss, San Jose State University (SJSU), the agency teams of Jenni Kommunikation and Tweakfest.
With the much improved Collanos Workplace 1.1, new stories will be added frequently over the next weeks.

Early this year we also launched the very successful Collanos Ambassador program. Collanos friends from all over the world, including the U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Canada, Nicaragua, Brazil and the Philippines, voluntarily motivate, communicate, invite and support other Collanos users in their vicinity. This has been a great reward for our team to see other users so actively engaged with the Collanos community and provide us with valuable feedback.

Is there anything else we can do better? Oh, yes, there is!
We learned a lot over these last few months and have pushed our team decentralization to the maximum and beyond. Technology allows having teams spread all over the world but there are also limitations. As a result, we are going to concentrate our business functions in certain locations with the development organization in Kharkov, Ukraine, and the management and marketing in Switzerland and San Francisco.

Our product needed more time to mature than we had expected. This was a tough learning. The good news is that Version 1.1 is a major step forward and with Version 1.2 we are going to close the final open gaps: Just glimpse into the future with our Founder and CTO Franco Dal Molin.

If you are interested in contributing further to Collanos’ success, we have come up with four examples of things you can do:
1. Use Collanos Workplace with your teams
2. Talk , write, comment about Collanos to others (users, bloggers, analysts, journalists or investors…) about your team success and experience, and, of course, share it with us
3. Motivate and help others understand the value of Collanos-based teamwork - by becoming or nominating an ambassador
4. Invite friends and colleagues to use Collanos
We highly appreciate your help. Collanos Workplace 1.1 is a major milestone in the history of Collanos and a great point to start spreading the Collanos word out to all team-based professionals.

Many thanks to all of you who supported us over these first months, following the launch of Collanos Workplace.”

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.

SAN FRANCISCO — May 24, 2007 — Collanos Software today released Collanos Workplace 1.1, a free p2p platform that enables team collaboration on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems without the need for a server. Version 1.1 lays the foundation for global team collaboration. In addition, several new features have been added, including a Central User Directory, User Sign In/Out, and Vista OS support. Collanos delivers increased reliability, speed, and overall performance.

Collanos Workplace offers small business teams, students, non-profit organizations, and other knowledge-sharing professionals, an easy-to-use set of comprehensive collaboration tools. Collanos’ global collaborative network allows internet users to easily form teams and effectively collaborate together on a shared passion, goal, or project.

With the introduction of the Collanos Central User Directory, users will be able to see and invite any other Collanos community member, even if they are offline. Collanos Workplace allows users to restore any previous version of team member contributions. The Auto start kicks off the replication process immediately after the computer goes online. With the new Sign In/Out step, on top of the existing data encryption and secure storage, Collanos adds an additional security measure to protect project and team data.

Existing Workplace users will see an immediate improvement with the overall performance of the application, and in the speed of content replication across each team member’s workspaces.

With this new release, Collanos Software continues to execute on its vision of bringing free, easy-to-use, yet powerful team collaboration solutions to millions of internet users. Collanos’ mission is connecting collaborating people and enabling professional teamwork on a global basis and beyond enterprise boundaries.

“Over the last few months Collanos has been collecting input from the thousands of Windows, Mac and Linux users to better manage their team projects,” said Franco Dal Molin, CTO and President of Collanos. “Quarter over quarter Collanos triples its users. From the new release we expect important acceleration for this growth.

Collanos bringt Workplace 1.1. mit neuen Features auf den Markt

Zürich, 15. Mai 2007 – Collanos Software bringt Collanos Workplace 1.1. auf den Markt. Die aktuelle Version der kostenlosen Software für firmen- und teamübergreifendes Zusammenarbeiten im Internet wartet mit Neuheiten auf: Sie ermöglicht das Auffinden von Teammitgliedern, auch wenn diese nicht online sind, vereinfacht die Zusammenarbeit unter den Mitgliedern, erhöht die Sicherheit und läuft neu auch unter Vista.

Collanos Mitglieder können ihr User-Profil dem gesamten Netzwerk zugänglich machen. Damit schafft Collanos ein globales Netzwerk. So können andere Collanos Nutzer via Internet einfach gefunden und eingeladen werden – selbst wenn ein Mitglied offline ist. „Wir müssen öfters neue Teammember in Collanos einladen, die genau zu dem Zeitpunkt nicht online sind“, erklärt Christian Aglen, Wirtschafts-Student an der Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. „Mit dem neuen Benutzerverzeichnis können wir jeden User finden und unabhängig vom Status einladen.“

Mit Collanos kann man jederzeit auf frühere Versionen von Beiträgen und Informationen zurückgreifen. Neu synchronisiert Collanos die Informationen unter den Mitgliedern, sobald die Computer eingeschaltet werden. Die neue Version garantiert hohe Sicherheit der Projekt- und Teamdaten dank Login und verschlüsselter Datenhaltung sowie Übertragung.

Typische Collanos-Nutzer sind kleinere, innovative Firmen, mobil und global agierende Arbeitsgruppen, aber auch Studenten, die eine flexible Kollaborationsplattform über Standort- und Firmengrenzen hinaus benötigen.

„Zehntausende Benutzer brauchen Collanos Workplace, um auf gemeinsame Dokumente, Kontakte, Diskussionen und Projekte zuzugreifen und dies unabhängig davon, ob sie unter Windows, Mac OS X oder Linux oder einer Kombination davon arbeiten“, erklärt Peter Helfenstein, Collanos CEO. „Collanos verdreifacht von Quartal zu Quartal die Nutzer. Von der neuen Version erwarten wir eine weitere Beschleunigung des Zuspruchs.“

Der kostenlos erhältliche Collanos Workplace 1.1 steht unter www.collanos.com zum Download bereit.

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:
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.

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!