Collanos Workplace 1.2.0.1 – Release Notes

[Franco Dal Molin]

Note: These release notes are also available as PDF document. A link can be found at the bottom of this post, if you are registered and logged in the Forum.



SUMMARY


Collanos Workplace version 1.2.0.1 is an important new release. Over 90 issues were addressed and fixed, as well as new functions introduced. This release contains a mix of technical improvements and new user features.

The technical improvements are solving most problems users encountered in the past, mainly issues related to installation, compatibility on Mac OS X or Windows Vista, as well as computer resource consumption. A new formatting rule for Collanos Names prepares the ground for great new features, such as Collanos Phone and related voice services. They will be rolled out very soon. All these technical improvements lay a solid foundation on which we will be able to build new releases going forward.

On the user features side, the core P2P content replication subsystem has been improved to flexibly fetch “data pieces” from other member peers, not just from the originator. This change will make the overall synchronization smoother and faster in most cases. Some restrictions still apply and will be removed with the next maintenance release. See below for more details. Offline users are notified immediately by email when invited. Users can import existing address books and invite
their contacts to join Collanos. If users encounter problems, they can comfortably send their log files automatically to our technical support.

Numerous minor issues were fixed as well, such as GUI and font formatting differences on the various operating systems, or communications traffic overhead. This release includes translations to English, German and Chinese, as usual. We hope you will find this release valuable and look forward to your feedbacks. The next few releases will be more exciting from a user's perspective, as they will deliver new functionality and additional capabilities. Key feature requests received from users in the past will be addressed. A product road map describing our plans will be published very shortly.


RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS

This Workplace release contains a number of important improvements and new features:

– An improved replication algorithm makes workspaces synchronize flexibly and fast.
– Brand new installers solve most problems related to setting up on different operating systems.
– The installer package size was reduced significantly, between 31% (Linux) and 44% (Mac).
– Users can import contacts from their existing address books and invite them to Collanos.
– Users that are offline while being invited, will be notified by email automatically.
– Improved P2P subsystem runs faster, is less resource hungry, and scales much better.
– Bug reports can be sent to Collanos automatically.
– Existing Collanos Names will be checked against new formatting rules and updated.
– Native compatibility on Mac OS X and Windows Vista has been achieved.
– The Help subsystem has been removed from the Workplace and is available online.


COMPATIBILITY

Important: All members are required to update to this latest Workplace version 1.2.0.1 to guarantee compatibility within your shared team workspaces.

Related notice: In the future it will be possible for team members with different Workplace versions to still communicate with each other. This new capability will be available from the next release.


DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS

Improved P2P Replication
The replication subsystem has further been improved, by introducing an important new service element. An example will make this clear: If two peers (e.g. Sender A and Receiver B) can not complete their content synchronization directly, other members of the same workspace can help out as well (e.g. Receiver B can try to fetch the required pieces also from Members C, D, E etc.). This improvement will mostly benefit situations where members must exchange large files and/or large quantities of files.
Important Limitation: This isn't yet the full “fetch any content from any peer” solution. Senders and Receivers must still be online at the same time – at least initially for a short period of time – in order to exchange metadata information about their content. Once this is done, the actual content can be fetched from any other member peer. The next Workplace release will contain the full “fetch any content from any peer” capability.

Brand New Installers
The Workplace installers have been reimplemented completely, delivering many install & update related benefits. Workplace now stores application program files (read-only), configuration information, and user data in three separate locations. We are following the suggested standard directory paths on all operating systems. The installer has been simplified further. New users can install in three simple steps. The technology used for the installer has been updated, which results in better support for the latest operating systems, including Windows Vista.

Invite Your Contacts to Join Collanos
The function “Invite to Collanos” has been removed from the Web site, implemented into the Workplace application, and improved greatly. This feature now allows to import contacts from existing address books. Currently 24 different sources are supported, including the most popular web email services, messaging systems, social network providers, CSV import formats, and from the clipboard. More sources will be added in the future.

Invitation Notifications for Offline Users
Some Collanos users choose to not run the Workplace application permanently. It can be quite hard to invite such a user, because they would get the invitation only when they get online the next time. We are now sending out email notifications to these users. Offline invitees will receive a friendly email, asking them to switch on their Workplace. These emails are generated automatically by the Collanos system (with a sending delay of 10 minutes). If a translation is available, the email text will be in the language the invitee has preselected in his or her user profile.

Updated P2P Subsystem
Collanos uses the JXTA P2P standard to implement its basic P2P transport layer. We updated the JXTA libraries to the latest version with a number of positive effects. The Workplace now uses about 20-25 fewer Threads. Users benefit from faster operation and less load on their CPU. The Collanos super peer infrastructure (also known as the “Relay” and “Rendezvous” super peers) now scales much better. We are able to support more users with the same hardware. Finally, P2P connections are established much faster, which improves the overall user experience.

Sending Bug Reports to Collanos
Feedback and bug reports (with attached system log files) can now be sent directly to Collanos technical support from within the Workplace. In the past, users had to separately write an email and attach the logs files manually. The new “Report Problem/Bug” function prepares the reports and sends them automatically to Collanos in the background.

New Compatible Collanos Names
We are going to roll out a number of new features and applications in the near future, most notably the Collanos Phone. For reasons of technical compatibility, we must now restrict the formatting of Collanos Names. For instance, blanks or special characters like “@” will not be allowed anymore. Collanos Names must be from 6 to 32 characters, and can contain only alphanumeric characters (a-z and 0-9) as well as dots (.). About 20% of our user base will have to change their Collanos Names. We have implemented an automated name changing logic that will kick-in during login, but you will notice this only if you have an incompatible Collanos Name.

Updated GUI Frameworks
We have upgraded an important framework of our application. The so called Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is the foundation for our graphical user interface, the pluggable component model, and other technical features. By upgrading to the latest version 3.3, we were able to fix problems on Mac OS X, such as wrong behavior of the dock and the application windows. On Windows Vista we now use the native Vista windowing system, which makes Workplace behave like a native Windows Vista application.

Help System Removed and Put Online
We decided to remove the built-in help subsystem and put the content online on our web site. The benefits include much smaller installer packages and less burden on application and CPU. Most importantly, we will be able to create new language translations of the Help content much faster, without being dependent from product releases. On Windows the size of the installers packages went down from 51 to 33MB, on Mac OS X from 40 to 22MB, and on Linux from 55 to 38MB.