Collanos Blog

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.

When Email isn’t enough anymore

How do you organize your hundreds of emails? How do you find attachments? And how do you navigate and identify the relevant information in the response mail to the response mail of the response mail? If you ask yourself such questions regularly, it is time for a change. Time to use a new solution and to work differently.

Collanos workplace allows to work in teams without the need of permanently sending emails. Data is exchanged within the team directly. Workplace is the home of team workspaces, work areas for teams. Users invited to spaces work with team data and communicate with team members.

Stored team data can be manifold: Chats, dicussions, tasks, files or team notes.

And data exchange between team members does NOT need a server. It just runs on the team member’s computers on Windows, Mac or Linux. It works through firewalls and stored data as well as the internet communication between the team members is secure.

To be part of the global Collanos network, you only need to register at the first start and request a Collanos name for your installation. Registration and use of Collanos Workplace is free.

Check it out. Soon you will only use email to communicate with those people who do not have Collanos Workplace installed yet on their computer.

Wenn eMail nicht mehr genügt

Wie organisieren Sie ihre Hunderten von eMails? Wie finden Sie die Anhänge Ihrer eMails wieder? Und wie finden Sie vor lauter Antwort auf die Antwort einer Antwort den richtigen Inhalt? Wenn Sie sich regelmässig solche Fragen stellen, ist es Zeit, eine Veränderung vorzunehmen und mit einem neuem Produkt etwas ganz anders zu machen.

Collanos Workplace ermöglicht, im Team zu arbeiten, ohne permanent eMails versenden zu müssen. Daten werden innerhalb des Teams ganz einfach direkt ausgetauscht. Workplace beherbergt Arbeitsbereiche, Workspaces genannt, für Teams. Benutzer, die zu diesen eingeladen sind, können mit dort abgelegten Daten arbeiten und im Team kommunizieren.

Abgelegte Daten in einem Arbeitsbereich können sehr vielfältig sein: Chats, Diskussionen, Tasks, Dateien oder Teamnotizen.

Der Datenaustausch unter den Teammitgliedern benötigt man KEINEN Server. Und Collanos Workplace läuft für Teammitglieder auf Windows, Mac oder Linux. Er funktioniert durch Firewalls und die sowohl die gespeicherten Daten wie die Kommunikation über das Internet zwischen den Teilnehmer ist sicher.

Um im globalen Collanos-Netzwerk mit dabei zu sein, muss man sich lediglich beim ersten Aufstarten anmelden und für den Workplace einen Collanos Namen beantragen. Sowohl die Registrierung wie auch die Nutzung von Collanos Workplaces ist kostenlos.

Probieren Sie es mal aus, Sie werden das eMail nur noch zur Kommunikation mit denjenigen verwenden, die noch keinen Collanos Workplace installiert haben.

For some years, several approaches to efficient work in teams, generally called Collaboration, have been initiated, from e-mail and groupware up to Intranet team portals or chat solutions. Some of them are well-established now, for others it is – at best – still a long way to get there. If you consider the challenge of collaboration from the users`point of view, it becomes quickly apparent that there is still a want for improved concepts.

Staff members working in teams within their company are comparably well off – at least if the company structure is a solid one, for example implementing a Lotus Notes/Domino infrastructure. Version 8 of Lotus Notes/Domino together with the Notes-activities has made a great leap towards a flexible collaboration, even though it remains restricted to comparably inflexible Enterprise IT infrastructures. However, mobile users and smaller companies with largely virtual structures as well as temporarily implemented virtual structures for work beyond enterprise boundary, are facing a completely different scenario.

In this area, the typical collaboration tool is e-mail. Everybody is familiar with overflowing mail boxes, and hardly anyone manages to handle the endless amount of attachments efficiently. All things considered, e-mail is an important medium, but simply unsuitable for a great deal of tasks.

Additional chat programs and other mechanisms add to the miserable situation that more and more tools are available without really simplifying communication, just because there are to many different systems and methods. Skype chats are a nice invention, with the results being saved in a log file, but scarcely anybody will ever read these log files.

Looking at the problem with a view to what a typical mobile user working in virtual structures really needs, it becomes quite obvious that many of the standard approaches do not work. The number of users affected by this deficiency is rather large, comprising freelance consultants, small innovative companies, research groups and many others. In these scenarios, solutions requiring their own server infrastructure are the first to be out of the race, for such infrastructures need to be built up and managed by people well-acquainted with this job – who are mostly missing. Additionally, more specific problems are involved as the right bandwidth for accessing the own server, or the higher provider fees for connections providing a fixed IP address – not to mention security challenges. This means to exclude all systems like Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange – the latter anyway being rather a mail than a collaboration tool – from a possible selection.

E-mail alone definitely is not capable of covering this demand. WebDAV and various kinds of Internet filing tools are likewise unsuitable, alone for security reasons. So what else is on offer? Hosted Microsoft-Sharepoint solutions and other web-based collaboration infrastructures might solve the problem, but in the first place, hosting is rarely a cheap option, and the needed administration effort is considerable. Finally, this concept reaches the end of its potency for people sitting aboard a train badly missing a stable internet connection. For mobile users it is not at all a satisfying option to only work web-based. But at least, web solutions score with platform independence.

The requirements of the user group in question must be met by a tool that allows offline working – and can be used on various platforms. What these users need is a solution which by demand can also be accessed via web, particularly to integrate staff members from bigger enterprises who are involved in a common project and have to follow specific IT rules not allowing them to install a local application. The ideal solution should enable the user to exchange documents, manage calendars, maintain tasks and do other basic work – in the most simple way. If more than one computer is used, identical data should be accessible on all of them. Add some integrated chat or even VoIP functions for communication within virtual teams, and you will get a tool that supports the mobile virtual user much better than e-mail or the like.

Collaboration vendors have become aware of this demand. Collanos Workplace offered by Collanos clearly addresses this focus. Some of the needed functions as platform independence und offline capability are already implemented, others are found in the Roadmap, from VoIP integration and hosted online services to allow browser-based working, up to a simplified use on more than one computer. The whole system is characterized by a user-friendly look-and-feel. Another solution positioning itself in this market segment is Microsoft Office Groove. However, it rather represents a supplement to Microsoft Exchanger Server – thus catching up with Lotus Notes/Domino 8. And there is no platform independence.

This does not mean that e-mailing will be completely off-limits for users in question. But in many scenarios, information access will be much easier than before – and serve the large group of mobile people working in virtual structures in a more adequate way.

The author, Martin Kuppinger, is IT analyst and founder of the analyst firm Kuppinger Cole + Partner. He also works as a freelance journalist and has written more than 50 IT books in the last few years.

Es gibt schon seit vielen Jahren etliche Ansätze für die Zusammenarbeit von Teams, die „Collaboration“, angefangen von eMails über Groupware bis hin zu Team-Portalen für das Intranet oder Chat-Lösungen. Manche davon haben sich etabliert, andere sind – bestenfalls – auf dem Weg zu etablierten Lösungen. Doch wenn man sich einmal die Herausforderung „Collaboration“ aus Anwendersicht betrachtet, wird schnell deutlich, dass noch einiges im Argen liegt.

Wer innerhalb seines Unternehmens mit anderen Personen zusammenarbeiten muss, hat es dabei noch relativ gut – zumindest wenn das Unternehmen eine feste Struktur hat und beispielsweise eine Lotus Notes/Domino-Infrastruktur anbieten kann, die ja – mit der Version 8 und den Notes-Aktivitäten – auch bei der flexiblen Kollaboration einen deutlichen Sprung gemacht hat, nur eben in relativ starren Enterprise IT-Infrastrukturen. Ganz anders ist die Situation für mobile Benutzer und für kleinere Unternehmen mit eher virtuellen Strukturen, ebenso wie für temporär angelegte virtuelle Arbeitsstrukturen über Unternehmensgrenzen hinaus.

Das typische „Collaborations“-Werkzeug ist hier eMail. Wer hat nicht schon unter übervollen eMail-Boxen gelitten? Und wer kann schon effizient mit den ganzen Attachments von Mails umgehen? Letztlich ist eMail ein wichtiges Medium, aber für viele Aufgaben schlicht nicht geeignet.

Hinzu kommt, dass man mit zusätzlichen Chat-Programmen und anderen Mechanismen immer mehr neue Tools bekommt, die im Ergebnis nicht zur Vereinfachung der Kommunikation beitragen, weil man einfach zu viele verschiedene Kommunikationssysteme und –wege hat. Skype-Chats sind zwar nett und die Ergebnisse werden auch protokolliert. Aber wer schaut schon wirklich nach, was in den Chat-Protokollen steht?

Wenn man das Thema unter dem Blickwinkel der Anforderungen des typischen mobilen Benutzers betrachtet, der in virtuellen Strukturen arbeitet, wird schnell deutlich, dass hier viele der klassischen Ansätze nicht funktionieren. Und diese Gruppe von Benutzern ist nicht klein: Der frei arbeitende Unternehmensberater, kleine und innovative Unternehmen, Forschungsverbünde und viele andere Beispiele lassen sich hier nennen.

Lösungen, die eine eigene Server-Infrastruktur erfordern, fallen hier typischerweise schon weg. Denn es gibt meist niemand, der die Infrastruktur aufbauen und verwalten könnte, von Detailproblemen wie der Bandbreite für den Zugriff auf eigene Server und die höheren Provider-Kosten für Anbindungen mit fixer IP-Adresse und Sicherheitsproblemen mal ganz abgesehen. Also eben kein Lotus Domino, kein Microsoft Exchange – das ja ohnehin mehr Mail als Collaboration ist – und auch kein anderes System aus dieser Kategorie.

eMail alleine reicht auch nicht aus. WebDAV und irgendwelche Ablagen im Internet sind auch nicht die Lösung, schon aus Gründen der Sicherheit. Was bleibt also? Gehostete Microsoft Sharepoint-Lösungen oder andere solche web-basierenden Collaborations-Infrastrukturen könnten eine Lösung sein. Aber erstens ist das Hosting selten wirklich günstig. Zweitens hat man auch hier einen gewissen administrativen Aufwand. Und drittens scheitert das Konzept spätestens dann, wenn man im Zug sitzt und keine stabilen Internet-Verbindungen hat. Für mobile Nutzer ist es keineswegs optimal, nur web-basierend zu arbeiten. Immerhin haben Web-Lösungen aber den Vorteil der Plattformunabhängigkeit.

Für die Anforderungen der betrachteten Benutzergruppe braucht man aber ein Tool, mit dem man offline arbeiten kann. Man braucht ein Werkzeug, das auf verschiedenen Plattformen einsetzbar ist. Und man braucht eine Lösung, die bei Bedarf auch über das Web erreichbar ist – und zwar vor allem, um Personen aus größeren Unternehmen einbinden zu können, mit denen man in einem Projekt zusammenarbeitet und bei denen die IT-Richtlinien die Installation einer lokalen Anwendung verbieten. Mit der Lösung sollte man Dokumente austauschen, Kalender verwalten, Tasks pflegen und andere Grundfunktionen durchführen können – und das in möglichst einfacher Weise. Und wenn man mehr als einen Rechner nutzt, sollte man doch immer auf die gleichen Daten zugreifen können. Dazu noch integrierte Chat- und vielleicht sogar VoIP-Funktionen für die Kommunikation innerhalb der virtuellen Teams, und „schon“ hat man ein Werkzeug, mit dem der mobile, virtuelle Mensch viel besser arbeiten kann als mit eMails und anderen Ansätzen.

Genau auf diesem Weg befindet sich Collanos mit seinem Collanos Workplace. Einiges ist schon da, wie die Plattformunabhängigkeit und die Offline-Fähigkeit. Anderes findet sich in der Roadmap, angefangen von der VoIP-Integration über die gehosteten Online-Dienste, mit denen man auch über den Browser arbeiten kann und eine einfachere Nutzung von mehreren Rechnern aus. Und das Ganze in einer Form, die einfach nutzbar ist. Ein anderes Tool in diesem Marktsegment ist Microsoft Office Groove, das aber eher in Ergänzung zum Microsoft Exchange Server gegen Lotus Notes/Domino 8 positioniert ist. Hier fehlt beispielsweise auch die Plattformunabhängigkeit.

Das heißt nicht, dass man in solchen Strukturen weiterhin eMails nutzen wird. Aber: Man wird viele Informationen einfacher nutzen können als bisher. Und in einer Weise, die für die große Gruppe der mobilen, in virtuellen Strukturen arbeitenden Menschen angemessen ist.

Über den Autor:
Martin Kuppinger ist IT-Analyst und Gründer des Analystenhauses Kuppinger Cole + Partner. Zudem arbeitet er gelegentlich als freier Journalist und hat im Laufe der Jahre mehr als 50 IT-Fachbücher verfasst.

Collanos Software wishes you a happy and prosperous New Year.

2008 will be important for Collanos and hopefully quite exciting for you, one of our thousands “pioneering users”!

Collanos Phone Beta:

We’re starting the year with the introduction of valuable new (and free) functionality!

In cooperation with our voice services partner, Translumina Networks, we just launched the first Beta version of Collanos Phone, a service with voice, video and instant messaging features. The Beta program will demonstrate the robustness of the new offering. We hope you will enjoy these great new features. Your experiences and feedback are highly regarded and valuable to us and the entire Collanos user community. Please check it out and share your opinion on our Community site.

After the Beta phase (should last a couple of weeks) we will launch Collanos Phone 1.0, including premium voice features, allowing you to be called from the public telephone network as well as to call team members’ phones.

Integrated in the Phone is a multi-protocol instant messaging capability, allowing you to use Collanos Phone as your instant messaging front end to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and Jabber.

Note: Collanos Phone uses the same “Collanos Name” and user profile that you have already created with Collanos Workplace.

Collanos Workplace 1.2:
As you may be aware, we recently launched a much improved version of Collanos Workplace, 1.2. After migrating the supporting infrastructure to this new version, it is now required for all users to upgrade to Collanos Workplace 1.2. Earlier versions (V1.1 and older) are no longer supported by the network infrastructure.

The next version of Collanos Workplace, 1.3, including the long awaited team synchronization functionality as well as new messaging capabilities, will follow very soon.

Both the new Collanos Phone Beta and Collanos Workplace can be downloaded from http://www.collanos.com/downloads. We look forward to reading about your experiences. You can be assured, while 2008 has just started, it will be an exciting year for Collanos users!

Often I attend local Bay Area events where the latest and greatest Web 2.0 companies showcase their latest wares. One example is the ever-growing monthly SF New Tech Meetup, which is portrayed as follows on their web site:

Monthly Meetup to discuss and show-and-tell new technology: Web 2.0 to Nanotech, Digital content to video games. Cool new tech. Geeks, inventors, new companies with cool products and ANYONE curious about new tech is welcome.

Notice that the word “cool” is mentioned twice in this single paragraph. To be honest, many of the companies presenting at these events certainly fall under the ‘cool’ category. After all, we ourselves, Collanos Software, presented there earlier this year. However, is ‘cool’ the accurate criteria to be qualified to present at these specific events? Does ‘cool’ necessarily imply that this is also a promising company/application/service?

Wikipedia’s interpretation of ‘cool’ is:

…an aesthetic of attitude, behavior, comportment, appearance, style and Zeitgeist. Because of the varied and changing connotations of cool, as well its subjective nature, the word has no single meaning…and is often used as an expression of admiration or approval.

I can sense the admiration of attendees at such events but this still does not guarantee that a presenting cool company is on the road to success.

Last week I was corresponding with Scott, a writer and an active Collanos member who brought up a great point:

Let’s face it–this is an industry that tends to develop cool ideas because they’re technologically possible and then has to convince customers that they need these products.

So many of these ‘cool’ applications have not only been coded by brilliant engineers but also conceived by them. I guess the ‘code it and they will come’ attitude doesn’t always fly.

Scott follows up on his point and how it relates to Collanos:

Teaming is different. This is real-world stuff that helps people pull what they already do into one place, and provides added benefits, like tracking and project management.

Collanos Workplace, our flagship peer-to-peer solution provides immediate and significant value to dispersed teams at minimal (or more accurately, zero) costs. Our typical Collanos user, is someone who needs to collaborate on a team project with members across multiple organizations, does not have the time and resources to set up an enterprise-level IT environment and needs something dead-easy to use so that all team members embrace the application rapidly.

Such users rank ‘Coollanos’ high up on the ‘coolometer’, and there are millions of such potential users across the globe who may not be sitting in the audience of these web 2.0 events but are gradually getting exposed to the great coverage we are getting in the blogosphere (see latest: AWH Weblog, Stu Downes ): and the press (eWeek.com). Cool?!

In the 10th Annual Global Information Security Survey, conducted by InformationWeek and Accenture, some of the conclusions drawn from the data, gathered from over 3,000 US and Chinese organizations, are startling. A large majority of organizations feel just as vulnerable to security attacks as they were the previous year.

Although this survey focuses on large enterprises, here at Collanos our goal is to provide professional users (SMB and other organizations) with a true sense that their systems and data are in good hands and that with minimal resources (hey, Workplace is free!) you can reduce much of the security risks identified in this survey. As you can see in the chart below (drawn from the survey), viruses/worms, spyware/malware, spam, unauthorized employee access are the top four priorities on company’s security agenda.

Using Collanos Workplace all four of these vulnerabilities can be avoided altogether since Collanos workspaces are closed to invitees only. Your team decides who gets invited to these invite-only workspaces. Instead of using same-old-vulnerable-email to collaborate, users communicate in the workspace via Discussions and Chats.

Collanos does not install any spyware/malware on users’ machines (See Privacy Statement). You can create as many workspaces as you wish and invite only the employees that are members of the specific project at hand.

In regards to Customer-data theft (Priority #5) and Mobile device theft (#7), Collanos workspace data can be viewed only via the Collanos application, which is password (login) protected. If a computer is stolen, the thief would have to get access to the password protected application, otherwise, the data is plain gibberish. No team data is stored outside of the team members’ computers. Synchronization and storage is fully encrypted, using standard AES 256, and goes directly between team members’ computers when they can communicate directly in the network. Very often this is not possible because of Firewalls and NATs (Network Address Translation). In that case encrypted data is transferred through a relay peer in the internet outside of the peers firewall. These relay peers only buffer a small number of messages during the information transmission so the data is very fragmented.

The other concerns listed, for the most part, are vulnerabilities related to email, which again are not very relevant to Collanos workspaces.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still several items on our product roadmap that we feel are required to provide our users additional mechanisms to secure their data and systems. One example is extending the functionality of our Permissions matrix, so that teams can assign different levels of access to different employees and data. Collanos continues to focus on delivering an ‘enterprise-class’ reliable and secure solution that non-enterprise users can feel very confident using with one caveat, it will be simple and inexpensive to deploy and administer.

Often we get emails from users asking why we are not steering 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 flavor-of-the-day, ‘cool’ hosted collaboration tool, which may be cool but not enough to be adopted by the entire team).

As a result, the SMB market is where we have home advantage. That being said, often we find enterprise users using our application as it still beats the complexity of running some of the afformentioned enterprise solutions. Furthermore, Collanos bridges the gap of being able to collaborate on a team project with organizations external to the brick firewalls of these tight enterprise systems.

Below is a correspondence between our team and a user bringing up some great points about why and 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 of the 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-to-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 to get them back would also be an issue. Again, in client / server we keep back-ups of all files on the server so it is an easy thing to get them back. I do not know how we would achieve this in a p2p environment. We trailed Groove before Microsoft had bought it and they seemed to address this issues by having servers in the loop - back-up 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 envision 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:

“Dear Collanos Member,

Many thanks for the in-depth comments. I understand you points very well. As I mentioned in our first email, we are really targeting a more ad-hoc teamwork environment. 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 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 back-up 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.

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 inter-company 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 work culture to share with their teams and to reuse. From there they 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 “

Would be very interested in getting your comments on this topic. You can respond directly to this posting or on the related board on our user forum.

Nothing like starting the today with a new great review of our product. Actually, there were two great blog postings by two different users who work for the same company AWH Weblog.

Brent and Jesse submitted their objective (truly unbiased) review of Collanos Workplace, including some cons, which we are always welcoming so that we can further improve our products. What’s more, Jesse even provided a step-by-step installation guide for those of you first installing our peer-to-peer based team workspaces solution. Brent brings up some very valid points:

“Personally I was excited to test this product because I feel workplace communication and collaboration is weak in most companies…finding a product to help the process without adding extra work has been a challenge, until now…”

Collaboration adoption is extremely weak at non-enterprise companies (even enterprise adoption can be argued)…simply since we always default to same old out-of-context email. Organizing your content around team workspaces/projects is the fundamental value Collanos provides. Once you ‘think out of the inbox’, it’s hard to fall back to email when working on future team-based projects.

Brent also highlights a key Collanos differentiator, separating us from the many hosted team collaboration solutions currently out there, comparing the client vs. browser experience:

“…honestly I found the interoperability via a client much better than most online collaboration tools I have used…As well I found the overall interface well thought out and enjoyable to use.”

The reason being that with a rich client you get a rich experience, something you are so familiar with from other client applications such as Windows Explorer/Finder, folder navigation, Instant Messengers, etc. granting you immediate comprehension of the Collanos application with zero training required.

The work-offline advantages of Collanos are a no-brainer for those of us even with 10% network downtime throughout the day. The user interface and experience are just as important to get full team adoption, embracing the least tech-savvy member of the team. Otherwise, it’s back to email…

Areas for improvement, such as better permission management and hosted workspaces are already in the works (as is VoIP integration, calendaring and more) but we always like to hear from our users what is their most burning requirements (See related board on our user forum).

We applause Brent and Jesse’s thorough analysis and review of Collanos Workplace and encourage others to follow suit and share with the entire Collanos community how to make the best of Collanos and let us know where we can improve.