Collanos Blog

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: [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.

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!.

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.

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!