Darthvapor
Newbie
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Posts: 2
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« on: February 25, 2010, 02:24:51 PM » |
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I tried Collanos in my company back in 2007 and then had to move to Groove for corporate reasons. Now, we'd like to get rid of Groove - which I have learned to hate and I remembered Collanos and gave it another test-run.
While I still think that the features and interface are very, very good for a program that is offered for free, at the moment there are two major problems that just kill it for me:
1.) There is no reliability and speed in the syncing process between the various team members.
2.) I don't understand why a machine that is on a dsl line and perfectly online in various other applications, does take hours to "connect" (if at all).
These two problems are most probably related.
I have set up the latest available build of Collanos on a total of five machines (a mix of XP prof SP3, Vista Ultimate 32bit and Win7 Ultimate 32bit, some clients within a wired corporate network, some home PCs within a wireless LAN) and created test workspaces. I then invited the other machines, accepted the invitations and waited....and waited.... and waited.... I only managed to sync once: late at night, from a W7 to a Vista Ultimate client, at home, outside our corporate network. Initially, I thought that this was indicating the problem to be related to our office network (hardware firewall?), however, the next day, that very same setup failed to work for another newly created test workspace.
After more than a day, the workspaces had still not been replicated on the other office machines. One machine - with a working internet connection - is still trying to "connect" after 20 hours. A machine that was still trying to "connect" was successfully sending out invites, yet could not sync.
I have read all posts in the forum in search for a hint on what the problem could be. Once I had finished, I had no turn-key solution but I knew that mine was by no means an isolated problem but one, which at least one third of the posts focused on.
I made sure that the relevant ports were not blocked by my firewall. I changed the bandwidth settings in Collanos. I tried automatic acceptance of invites and manual. I tried restarts and re-installs. I tried switching to "offline" and back to "online" (which never worked, by the way). Nothing has made any visible difference.
For me this is not an annoyance, but a major problem with the core-functionality of the software. If I cannot guarantee quick replication of data within my team, then this software serves no purpose. In my present test, it's like a car that doesn't drive. It is still beautiful (nice interface), has good looking tuning parts (Phone) but lacks the basic functionality of a car. If I tell my team – which is spread over several time-zones, countries and OS – to use Collanos, I need to be sure that all stored data becomes available to all team members – quick and without any doubt or problem. The one reason for a peer to peer solution is to ease the necessity to be online to access your data. If replication takes hours and days of online time (irrespective of the amount of data), then it makes so sense.
To make this very clear: I am not out to badmouth your software. I am saying this because I personally think that the connection/syncing problem is the most pressing matter to look into - much more important than any bells and whistles that you add on top of that functionality. That process must be totally bulletproof and transparent on all supported OS. Once you got that, return to the make-up part.
PS: I think the forum should be revised and the “problems” section should be more clearly divided into sections dealing with the various aspects of the software (Setup, Interface, Syncing, etc.)
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