Collanos Blog

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:

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Collanos Workplace releases version 1.0.2 of its innovative P2P software for virtual teams

Zurich, February 8, 2007 – Collanos Software now offers its free cross-company, cross-platform collaboration solution in German.

Collanos Workplace allows teams to work together over the internet more efficiently, flexibly, and securely. They can access shared information such as contacts, discussions, documents, team calendars, tasks, and projects. Now, users can switch between English and German as Collanos takes the first step into localizing its global software.

“Tens of thousands of users have already installed Collanos Workplace on their computers, and every month we see a 130% growth rate,” said Peter Helfenstein, CEO of Collanos.

With offices in Switzerland and USA, Collanos expects to further accelerate this rapid growth with the German version.

“Over 25% of our users originate from Switzerland, Germany and Austria,” says Helfenstein. “With the German version, we will become even stronger in the Germanic region.”

Typical Collanos users are MBA students, small to mid-size businesses, non-profit organizations, and mobile work groups in large consulting companies seeking cross-organizational collaboration solutions. Users all commonly share the need for a flexible collaboration platform that spans several locations in order to optimize the workflow with colleagues, customers, providers, partners, and remote employees.

These users require that all team members have access to the latest version of documents and that all project-related discussions, emails, and other content are easily accessible in a shared environment. Since Collanos supports all major operating systems, users can always invite additional members to their workspaces.

“As a small company with globally dispersed employees and countless partners, we suffered from overflowing email inboxes and endless attachments,” recalls Alex Fries, CEO of PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Thanks to Collanos, we are now able to work as a ‘virtual team’ in a secure, structured environment, and in the context of our teams. Without Collanos, we would have had to invest in an expensive and complex collaboration system limiting us to a closed network.”

Reto Hartinger, a Swiss Internet expert and organizer of IT conferences, believes the free software has great promise, “Although Collanos is not yet as powerful as some of its older siblings, Lotus Notes, Sharepoint, and Groove, it will rapidly gain market share especially with innovative companies and collaboration within teams with high member turnover.” Hartinger also sees huge potential with lawyers, software developers, advertising and marketing agencies, and universities.

Peter Helfenstein added, “The German version was translated entirely by volunteers in our user community. This will happen with upcoming languages as well. Collanos will work with the community to maintain these versions.”

The software is available for free and can be downloaded at www.collanos.com.

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Collanos Workplace 1.0.2 nun auch in deutscher Sprachversion. P2P-Software für virtuelle Teams revolutioniert den Markt für Kollaborationswerkzeuge

Zürich, 8. Februar 2007 – Collanos stellt seine Software für firmenübergreifendes Zusammenarbeiten nun auch in deutscher Sprache zum Herunterladen bereit. Die kostenlose Software arbeitet unter Windows, Mac OS X und Linux. Gleichzeitig baut Collanos den Marketing- und Supportbereich aus.

Mit Collanos Workplace können Teams im Internet effizient, flexibel und sicher zusammen arbeiten. Sie können auf gemeinsame Informationen wie Kontakte, Diskussionen, Dokumente, Teamkalender, Aufgaben und Projekte zugreifen. Die Sprachversion der Benutzeroberfläche lässt sich im laufenden Betrieb von Englisch auf Deutsch umschalten.

“Bereits jetzt haben Zehntausende Collanos Workplace auf ihrem Rechner installiert und jeden Monat registrieren sich rund 130 % mehr Benutzer als im Vormonat”, erklärt Peter Helfenstein, CEO von Collanos. Das rasante Wachstum will das Jungunternehmen mit Sitz in der Schweiz und in den USA mit der deutschen Version nun noch beschleunigen.

“Über 25% der Registrierungen kommen heute schon aus der Schweiz, Deutschland und Österreich”, sagt Helfenstein. “Mit der neuen Version werden wir im deutschsprachigen Markt noch stärker.” Collanos baut darum in der Schweiz auch das Mitarbeiter-Team aus: Zusätzliche Stellen in den Bereichen Marketing und Benutzerunterstützung werden besetzt.

Typische Collanos-Nutzer sind kleinere, innovative Firmen, mobil arbeitende Arbeitsgruppen in großen Beratungsunternehmen, aber auch MBA-Studenten, die eine flexible Kollaborationsplattform über Standortgrenzen, für das Zusammenspiel mit Kunden, Lieferanten, Partnern und externen Mitarbeitern oder für den mobilen Einsatz benötigen. Diese Nutzer sind darauf angewiesen, dass jeder jederzeit auf die letzte Version eines Dokumentes zugreifen kann und dass Diskussionen, E-Mails und Kalkulationen eines Projektes innerhalb einer gemeinsamen Struktur immer von allen abrufbar sind. Da Collanos alle Betriebssysteme unterstützt, können Collanos-Nutzer einfach weitere Personen in ihre Projekt-Arbeitsumgebung einladen.

“Als kleine Firma mit weltweit verteilten Mitarbeitern und unzähligen Partnern litten wir unter hoffnungslos überfüllten Mailboxen mit unzähligen E-Mails mit angehängten Dokumenten”, erinnert sich Alex Fries, CEO von PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Dank Collanos haben wir nun unsere virtuelle zentrale Umgebung und können überall professionell und strukturiert zusammenarbeiten. Das wäre sonst nur mit einer teuren Collaboration-Umgebung im Rahmen eines firmeneigenen Netzwerks möglich.”

Reto Hartinger, einer der führenden Köpfe der Schweizer Internet-Szene und IT-Konferenzveranstalter, gibt der Gratissoftware gute Chancen: “Collanos ist zwar noch nicht so leistungsfähig wie einige seiner großen Brüder, aber gerade bei innovativen Firmen und für die Zusammenarbeit in Teams mit wechselnder Zusammensetzung wird sich Collanos rasch durchsetzen.” großes Potenzial sieht er unter anderem bei Anwälten, Software-Entwicklern, Werbe- und Marketing-Agenturen sowie Universitäten.

Weitere Sprachversionen von Collanos Workplace sollen folgen. Peter Helfenstein erklärt: “Bereits die deutsche Version wurde von Freiwilligen aus der User Community vorbereitet. Weitere Sprachen werden künftig gänzlich von den Nutzern erstellt und gemeinsam mit Collanos gepflegt.”

Die kostenlos erhältliche Software steht unter www.collanos.com zum Download bereit.

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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.

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We just picked up an interesting poll, run by Rod Boothby, asking users to vote for

tools that could be used by a large company to create a readable and writeable Intranet

Collanos Workplace seems to be faring pretty well! If nothing else, the poll provides a good shortlist of strong players in the business.

The question is quite interesting and not a trivial one. Although plenty has been written about it, I was not able to find a Wikipedia definition for “read/write web”, let alone “read/write intranet”.

Someone will have to start an article about it!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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

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Today we had our first ever holiday party and it wasn’t anything you would expect.

Our virtual VoIP party extended over four different time zones.

Bulgaria, Ukraine, Switzerland, Utah and California ‘dressed up’ for our 2-hour long party that included no food, no music and not even alcohol.

The main event was our virtual gift exchange which entailed each one of us getting the others a virtual gift worth no more than $10K.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Franco was invited to be the featured guest on “Dancing with the Stars” and an all-you-can-eat certificate at Sai’s Vietnamese restaurant.
• Matteo true to his Italian form, received an original Ferrari…suitcase.
• Casjen was smart enough to come up with an excuse and didn’t attend the party, I mean phone call.
• Peter got a 50 year old Rand computer with a steering wheel so that he can drive product strategy from the helm.
• Niki got a reminder that it has been over 12 years since Bulgaria fielded a decent national soccer team.
• Alex revealed his addiction to Monet paintings.
• Steven was beaten and bruised for being on the wagon (not that he was ever off…).
• Myself – I scored SIX live cows, producing fresh raw milk. Lot’s of raw milk.

Hopefully next year we will be able to play the game with real cash.

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