Collanos Blog

Get the illustrated PDF version of the Collanos Workplace 1.4.0.2 Release Notes (15 pages, with many screen shots).

This is a combined release note. It covers three different Collanos products and services, all being released at the same time.

• Collanos Workplace 1.4.0.2 is a maintenance releases of our flagship solution Collanos Workplace. It contains primarily bug fixes and various enhancements, but also a small number of new features. The focus of this release was to fix defects discovered since releasing the last major versions of Collanos Workplace and the functionally integrated Collanos Phone 1.4.0.1 in December 2008 and to further improve the system for best user experience.
• Dial-In Phone Numbers is a new premium service. Users can now subscribe to real phone numbers, making their Collanos Phone reachable from the outside, from any regular phone. Initially this service is being launched for Swiss numbers and available to Swiss residents only. Additional countries will be added gradually in the coming months.
• Web Application for Text Resource Translations is a comfortable web application for all Collanos Translators, which are Ambassadors who signed up to translate Collanos Workplace into their languages. A simple to use Web application makes it very easy to translate text resources into any language of the planet.

Collanos Workplace 1.4.0.2 – Release Highlights

• Much improved presence system – now faster, more reliable, and consistent
• New delivery status message in Chat window
• New Technical Page with system information (for technical users only)
• Combined start option for Collanos Phone and Collanos Workplace (when Workplace starts, Phone is also started)
• Collanos Phone now works also with older versions of Macintosh OS X (10.4.x “Tiger”)
• The Phone application can now also be updated automatically via the web
• Email address verifier in user profile, helps to reduce problems with mistyped addresses
• Various bug fixes related to system stability and operating systems particularities
• Several bug fixes related to functionality and user permissions, especially in area of Task Management
• Many GUI fixes related to drag-and-drop, working with links, window sizes, and other visual tweaks
• Exit from Workplace operation now works always
• Fixes and improvements in Installer and Uninstaller
• New and improved “Date picker” GUI element
• Corrections to text translations (mainly for German)

This was just the summary, get the detailed release notes for Collanos 1.4.0.2. Please download the newest Collanos Workplace 1.4.0.2.

Collanos Phone 1.4.0.2 is functionally integrated into Collanos Workplace and automatically installed with Collanos Workplace 1.4.0.2. For Collanos Phone only users a separate installation program is available.

We have switched on a new Collanos Ambassadors support system. It makes it easier to register as a new Ambassador and update existing Ambassador profiles. A new feature supports Collanos Ambassadors in communicating their Collanos related activities to all Collanos users. Collanos users can find Ambassadors on certain search criteria, including key words!

The Collanos Ambassador program has been harmonized and now includes the following five Collanos Ambassador roles:

		Collanos Promoter You are outgoing, marketing-oriented, and love networking. You see many new opportunities how Collanos can be used within and beyond your organisation(s). You like to tell others about the benefits, create workspace templates, share the good news, and of course invite many others to join. You are even setting up workshops and presentations to promote your ideas.
		Blogger Your strength and passion is writing. You like to share news about useful tools, innovative technologies, team working trends, and unified collaboration approaches. Sometimes you compare several tools, including Collanos, write about your first hand experiences, and share review reports about the latest releases. The world wide web of Blogs, Twitter, Feeds, etc. is your comfort zone.
		Collanos Supporter You like to assist other users if they have questions or struggle using our solutions. You are monitoring the Collanos Forum quite regularly and registered to get notifications about new posts and ongoing discussions. Possibly your are fluent in a foreign language, and like to focus on your particular language, helping community members in your region. Of course you are yourself a passionate and advanced user.
		Collanos Beta Tester Your interest is product and use-case oriented. You are creative and have many ideas how Collanos’ solutions could evolve. You like to share your feature requests and contribute to product planning with a small team of product managers and quality assurance experts. You like to validate new features before they are launched. You are using Collanos everyday in your projects.
		Collanos Translator You like to see Collanos’ solutions become available in your own language. Your contribution is translating the text strings of the user interface(s), so that our engineering can create new language packs and add them to the standard. You are able to understand English quite well and translate important terms and sentences to your language. Within “your” language, you work with 1-2 other colleagues (if available).

More details can be found on the Collanos Ambassador Program web site. We are looking very much forward to see many new Collanos Ambassadors, encouraging Ambassador activities and to get feedback about the new Collanos Ambassador system! Your improvement opportunities are very welcome.

I am a paperless worker. As a consequence my MacBook Pro is my permanent companion. I only leave home  taking it with me. Without I am lost.

Over time quite some critical data got stored on my notebook. But frankly, I not making backups as seriously as I should. There has been a permanent risk to lose data. Installing and using Collanos Workplace rapidly reduced it!

But isn’t Apple’s Time Machine explicitely designed for this purpose? Yes, I work with it, but it just needs to much time and I need to launch on purpose sitting in the office.

How did Collanos reduce risk of data loss for me?
I installed “Collanos Workplace” both on my my notebook and on my desktop computer – as described on Collanos Forum, each installation used with an own “Collanos Name”. Collanos Workplace does not yet allow to use multiple installations with the same user name. Hint: Register one Collanos name for every installation of Collanos Workplace you run.

On my notebook I have quite a number of workspaces where I share data with the different teams I am member of. In each of these team spaces I invite my Desktop Collanos Workplace user. On the road I open my documents and notes from within Collanos Workplace, rather than from the harddisk or from within Mac’s Finder. As soon as I change a file, it is synchronized with my desktop. The same happens when I am in the office. Collanos Workplace is permanently keeping my computers’ data in sync.

This background replication works so well that I do not really need any additional backup anymore. Should something happen to the data on my notebook I just reinstall Collanos Workplace and invite my Notebook’s Workplace from the desktop into the team spaces again. And a little bit later all my data is back.

Isn’t that cool? It is so cool that I do rarely launch Time Machine – as before Collanos but now with much less risk – and if I do so, just to backup my emails. I am convinced that in the future Collanos will even support me in this task.

Top 10 lists are out. Analyzing the short tail of registered Collanos users per country is nevertheless revealing. The distribution of the countries is changing slowly, not really surprisingly.

United States is number 1 with 35% of the registrations. This percentage share is growing steadily since the introduction of version 1.1.

Position 2 is Switzerland with 12%! After all, it is Collanos’ home country and Collanos Workplace has a German version of the product. The share of Switzerland is slowly decreasing which actually is expected given the size of the market.

Not surprisingly number 3 is Germany with 9%.

Rank 4, 5 and 6 are Canada, UK, India with each 4% and Australia 7th with 2% as all are strong English speaking markets. These countries have shown the strongest growth percentage over the last month with India having the highest growth rate.

8 and 9 follow the top markets even without national language versions: Netherlands and Italy with 2% of registrations.

Ranked 10 now is China also with 2%. The introduction of the Chinese version has led to nice growth, not only in China but overall in East Asia. Many countries in that area are climbing up the list and are in the meantime positioned between 20 and 30.

And who is positioned to enter the top 10? 11 to 20 are Portugal, Sweden, Austria (Collanos needs some push in the German speaking neighbourhood it seems), Brazil, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Russia, France, Poland and Philippines.

It will be interesting to see the changes over the next few months. Since the numbers of registred users are still small the effects of launching new language versions as well as of the work of active Collanos Ambassadors and communities are strongly influencing the growth of the user base.

Great to see the number of Collanos users growing all over the world. I am glad to share these stats with all of you regularly.

We are excited to announce the availability of an update to Collanos Workplace 1.1.

As opposed to past updates, this specific update will not pop-up automatically when you open the application. You will need to visit our Downloads page, select your operating system and download the installer. Once you have completed the download, close Collanos Workplace, run the installation and when prompted where to install the application and application data be sure to select the existing locations of your current Collanos Workplace application and data. This will assure you are updating your existing application and data and not creating a new installation.

Important bug fixes, performance enhancements and new features have been introduced with this update. For more detailed information, read the release notes on our user forum.

The update also includes tasks that improve the storage of Collanos Workplace data and CPU performance. In certain scenarios, just after the installation, updating the data store might lead to heavy CPU load. In such cases, it is recommended to run the updated version of Collanos Workplace for the first time during a period where the PC is less loaded with other applications, for example overnight.

Also want to take this opportunity to welcome our two new Collanos Country Ambassadors, Paulo Xavier of Portugal (Ranked #12 in number of Collanos users) and Sergio Burdiles of Chile (Ranked Country #45). Want to represent Collanos in your country, campus or industry and help us get the Collanos word out or perhaps share with the Collanos community what your team is doing with Collanos via our Spotlight Series? Send us an email.

As always, looking forward to your feedback. Please share it with the entire community by posting it on our user forum.

Sincerely, Gil Heiman

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.

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!

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