Collanos for the Enterprise?

[Gil Heiman]

Often we get emails from users asking why we are not heading head on to the enterprise market. For now, Collanos Workplace is all about allowing our users to create ad hoc teams, very likely because they don't have the resources, time and skills to license a SharePoint, Groove, Groupwise, Notes, etc (or ramp up their entire team on the latest 'cool' hosted collaboration tool, which may be cool but not enough to be adopted by the team).

As a result, the SMB market is so much more our playing field. Nonetheless, often we find enterprise users using our application as it still beats the complexity of running some of the afformentioned enterprise solutions.

Below is a correspondence between our team and a user bringing up great points about how Collanos can fit in the enterprise market:

"Dear Collanos,

...There are a few issues that would need addressing to enable this product for an enterprise, and I am not sure as to whether doing this goes against the 'decentralised' model that collanos uses.  You would need some for of centralised controls.  You would want the ability, for example, to limit certain people from inviting members from outside the organisation. Additionally, from an IT admin point of view I have concerns that I would not know what was floating around the business.  In the standard client/server environment we can easily check which files are where, what they contain etc.  Having a 'closed network' which is what peer-peer does, would mean that we would be blind in this respect.  The lack of instant messaging logging is also of concern.

The issue of files being deleted / altered, and then users waiting them back would also be an issue.  Again, in client / server we keep backups of all files on the server so it is and easy thing to get them back.  I do not know how we would achieve this in a peer-peer environment.  We trailed Groove before Microsoft had bought it and they seemed to address this issues by having servers in the loop - backup server, relay server etc.  I understand that with Groove now you can upload/download content to Sharepoint servers.  This whole centralised modelling may be stepping away from the way you envisage your product evolving though, although I actually just regard them as a 'bigger client' in the loop.

What we were looking for was a simple way for certain teams to work together better.  We are currently implementing Lotus Notes as our email system and that obviously has very strong collaboration functionality.  However, it does require initial set-up and ongoing maintenance by IT - your type of product is a very quick way to get keep everything in the one place and just 'work'.   

Maybe you could enable your product to sync with a Lotus Domino server like Groove does with Sharepoint?  This would certainly help address many of the issues above.
Collanos Member"

Collanos response:

"Hi Collanos member,

Many thanks for the in depth comments. I understand you point very well. As I mentioned in our first mail we are really targeting a more ad-hoc teamwork need. Very valuable enterprise needs are as such second priority to what you call to an extent the "simple way for certain teams to work together better", fast, ad-hoc without administrative hurdles. The price we pay at the moment is that we cannot fulfill you very typical enterprise needs.

The idea of to be an extension to Lotus reaching beyond the Enterprise came up several times, not only from us. It could make a lot of sense.
 
We are working on closing some of the Enterprise gaps though. Instant messaging will be improved and stored. We are looking at integrating with server peers that will allow backup and potentially can store a superset of team Workplace data. And to improve Identity Management and the Recognition of users is something that we will need to address.
 
Just at the moment we are positioned differently and I think that we can create a lot of value for ad-hoc teams working together professionally with Collanos, more professional than using just email to support document-rich intercompany processes.
 
I am very glad to keep you posted on all our plans and new deliveries. Our goal is clearly through the "consumer" to play more and more a role in the Enterprise. Feedback like yours is invaluable for us. If you still see areas where in the context of your business a process can be supported successfully with a collaborative solution like Collanos, we will be glad to learn about it. I think that Collanos also has a role in helping people to improve their culture to share with their teams and to reuse. From there they then can move up into the Enterprise class collaboration league. My experience is that it is most of the time more about cultural barriers than missing technology if collaboration fails.
 
Many thanks.

Collanos "