Collanos Blog

At CeBIT 2009, Collanos and Translumina Networks will be launching LumiMagic, which is a cost-effective Linux box combining the functions of a VoIP telephone switchboard, network router, and WLAN access point. When integrated into a Collanos collaboration network, it offers companies and their partners a comprehensive communications and collaboration platform. The latest versions of Collanos Workplace and Collanos Phone will also be on display. Making its first appearance at the CeBIT (Booth A56/Hall 13) as part of the “Triple Play & more” consortium, Collanos will be exhibiting its software for electronic team collaboration among multiple organizations.

Collanos and Translumina Networks launch the LumiMagic telephone switchboard for SMBs

LumiMagic epitomizes the SMB (small and medium-sized businesses) telephone switchboard of the future. Oriented to the needs of SMBs, the compact, cost-effective Linux box combines the services of a VoIP telephone switchboard, network router, and wireless LAN access point in a single package. The innovative integration of the telephone switchboard into a Collanos collaboration network provides a company’s employees with the most direct communication paths and comprehensive teamwork support – all at low cost and regardless of their individual locations.

Every employee and every Collanos user at a supplier, partner, or customer location can be integrated into the company’s communications and collaboration network. Employees can thus be reached via their company phone number, and when it comes to their collaborative work with others within or outside the company, they can take advantage of functions geared toward team information sharing, instant messaging, telephone conferences, and project management. In doing so, telephony as well as Internet-based collaboration with every other employee and Collanos user worldwide is free of charge. Phone connections to the public telephone network are very inexpensive thanks to the typical low-cost VoIP telephone rates.

New Collanos Version

To be introduced at the CeBIT, Collanos’ latest Version 1.4.0.2 features many new functions and enhancements. New Premium services have been added to Collanos Workplace and Collanos Phone. For example, all users can now be reached at their own Collanos phone number from any public telephone.

Collanos Receives Dual Nominations for the 2009 IT INNOVATION PRIZE.

Collanos has been nominated for the “2009 IT INNOVATION PRIZE” at this year’s CeBIT for its innovative solution geared especially toward small and medium-sized businesses. That puts Collanos in the top three in the “Unified Communications” and “Special Awards – Switzerland” categories. The winners will be announced on March 5 at the official CeBIT awards ceremony.

Prices and Availability

Collanos Software products are free of charge and can be downloaded at http://www.collanos.com. Prices for LumiMagic vary depending on the package ordered and start at Euro 129 plus a monthly flat rate of Euro 19.

About Triple Play & more

”Triple Play & more” is a consortium of companies operating in the telecommunications and multimedia industries. Their areas of activity include construction, operations, maintenance, and financing of multimedia platforms as well as the development and sales of telecommunications and interactive multimedia services that are consolidated on telephony, broadband Internet, and television end devices.

In addition to companies of the Translumina Group (Translumina Networks, Comitas, Lambdastream, three60mobile), Triple Play & more also includes Collanos Software, CTModule, NetModule, AareNet, MHM and BlueBit.

Collanos und Translumina Networks lancieren mit LumiMagic auf der CeBIT 2009 eine kostengünstige Linux-Box, welche die Funktionen von VoIP Telefonzentrale, Netzwerkrouter und WLAN Access Point kombiniert. Integriert ins Collanos Collaboration Netzwerk bietet sie Unternehmen mit ihren Partnern eine umfassende Plattform für Kommunikation und Zusammenarbeit. Weiter werden die neusten Versionen von Collanos Workplace und Collanos Phone gezeigt. Im Rahmen des Zusammenschlusses „Triple Play & more“ präsentiert sich Collanos, Anbieterin von Software für die firmenübergreifende, elektronische Zusammenarbeit von Teams, erstmals auf der CeBIT (Stand A56/Halle 13).

LumiMagic VoIP PBX

Collanos und Translumina Networks lancieren die LumiMagic Telefonzentrale für KMU

LumiMagic verkörpert die KMU-Telefonzentrale der Zukunft. Ausgerichtet auf die Bedürfnisse von KMUs kombiniert die kleine, kostengünstige Linux-Box VoIP Telefonzentrale, Netzwerkrouter und Wireless LAN Access Point. Die innovative Integration der Telefonzentrale ins Collanos Collaboration Netzwerk ermöglicht den Mitarbeitenden eines Unternehmens unabhängig von deren Standort einfachste Kommunikationswege und umfassende Teamworkunterstützung bei geringen Kosten.

Jeder Mitarbeitende und jeder Collanos Nutzer bei Lieferanten, Partnern und Kunden, kann in das Kommunikations- und Kollaborations-Netzwerk der Firma integriert werden. So wird er weltweit über seine Firmen-Telefonnummer erreichbar und profitiert in der Zusammenarbeit mit anderen, innerhalb der Firma oder firmenübergreifend, von Funktionen für Team Information Sharing, Instant Messaging, Telefonkonferenz und Projektmanagement. Dabei ist für jeden Mitarbeitenden sowohl die Telefonie als auch die Zusammenarbeit im Internet mit jedem anderen Mitarbeiter und Collanos Nutzer weltweit kostenlos. Telefonverbindungen ins öffentliche Telefonnetz sind dank typischen VoIP Telefonkonditionen sehr kostengünstig.

Neue Collanos Version

Collanos weist in der zur CeBIT veröffentlichten Version 1.4.0.2 zahlreiche neue Funktionen und Optimierungen auf. Neue Premium-Services ergänzen Collanos Workplace und Collanos Phone: Jeder Nutzer kann nun über seine individuelle Collanos Telefonnummer von jedem öffentlichen Telefon erreicht werden.

Collanos zweimal für den INNOVATIONSPREIS-IT 2009 nominiert

Als innovative, speziell für den Mittelstand geeignete Lösung ist Collanos für den an der CeBIT 2009 vergebenen „INNOVATIONSPREIS-IT 2009“ nominiert. Collanos erreicht damit in der Kategorie „Unified Communications“, wie auch für die „Sonderauszeichnung Schweiz“ einen der ersten 3 Plätze. Die Sieger werden am 5. März, im Rahmen der offiziellen Preisverleihung auf der CeBIT bekanntgegeben.

Preise und Verfügbarkeit

Die Produkte von Collanos Software sind kostenfrei und können unter http://www.collanos.com heruntergeladen werden. Die Preise für die LumiMagic variieren je nach Umfang des Angebotes und beginnen bei CHF 199 zuzüglich einer monatlichen Pauschale von CHF 29.

Über Triple Play & more

Triple Play & more ist ein Zusammenschluss von Unternehmungen der Telekommunikations- und Multimediabranche. Ihre Tätigkeitsfelder umfassen Bau, Betrieb, Unterhalt und Finanzierung von Multimedia-Plattformen sowie Entwicklung und Vertrieb von Telekommunikations- und interaktiven Multimediadiensten, die auf  Telefonie-, Breitbandinternet- und TV-Endgeräten zusammengeführt werden. Neben den Unternehmungen der Translumina Gruppe (Translumina Networks, Comitas, Lambdastream, three60mobile) gehören Collanos Software, CTModule, NetModule, AareNet, MHM und BlueBit zu Triple Play & more.

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.

Check out the great free resources the organizer of the Enterprise 2.0 conference has just made available online. You will find great keynote videos, photos, podcasts, speaker slides, and more.

David Coleman wrote a great follow-up blog to the LaunchPad panel he sat on in last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. (See recorded webcast)

As a member of Collanos, I can very much relate to the Ent. 1.5 vs. 2.0 dilemma.
In recent demonstrations in Silicon Valley we often find ourselves over-shadowed by cool Ajax-based (and SaaS) applications that are cool but often either premature for mass user adoption or not justified as stand alone applications. Collanos may be missing the flare of some of these cool applications but if ‘cool’ is the criteria to be considered a 2.0 company, we are very happy to be a ‘1.5’.

Collanos is targeted at users seeking an easy-to-use, affordable and cross-platform solution for managing all cross-organizational team interactions in the context of their teams (hence ‘think out of the inbox’ and why it’s ‘9* better than email’). Enterprises may not be at the forefront of our targeted user-base but there surely are many enterprise users who can use such application when they need to figure a way to get an external member of the team onboard in a shared workspace without needing to put a request in for IT to grant the permissions and make access possible. The thousands of early adopters of our solutions can already attest to Collanos meeting these requirements as well as serving other critical requirements such as ad hoc team formation, data stored only on user machines (no data on servers) and more secure data transfer.

Collanos addresses the pains of today and therefore may in fact be a 1.5 company. When the underwater cables went down in Asia a few months ago and users could not connect to the internet, users flocked to Collanos. When users lose trust in their data being stored on some remote server due to another major breach of data privacy, they will seek out P2P-based solutions such as Collanos. When users come to terms with their email Inbox being their worst nightmare and seek a more contextual solution, Collanos’ team workspaces will spur their interests.

I can go on and on listing the benefits of Collanos Workplace, our flagship solution (and yes, we still need to further enhance the application), but I will leave it to the readers, including the enterprise ‘2.0’ users, to see for themselves how 1.5 is greater than 2.0.

Boston — June 20, 2007 – Collanos Software was selected to participate in Enterprise 2.0’s Launch Pad. Collanos’ mission is connecting people and enabling professional teamwork on a global basis and beyond enterprise boundaries.

Launch Pad features companies that are demonstrating the release of a new product or service. Collanos is one out of four companies selected to present on the main stage during Enterprise 2.0.

Collanos Workplace provides an easy to use, p2p platform for team members to collaborate on projects using Windows, Mac, and Linux Systems, without the need of a server. At the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad, Collanos will preview its new integrated communications services allowing team members to collaborate via voice and video in addition to conversation threads, instant messaging, and notes.

Collanos Workplace offers small business teams, students, non-profit organizations, and other knowledge-sharing professionals, an easy-to-use set of comprehensive collaboration tools. Collanos’ global collaborative network allows internet users to easily form teams and effectively collaborate together on a shared passion, goal, or project.

Enterprise 2.0 unites IT and business professionals striving for a more creative, alert, and productive company atmosphere. This conference drives the exploration and adoption of collaborative tools and technologies, focusing not only on the technology, but how the technology works with people.

For those who attended our “Think Out of the (In)box” event, here’s a recap with some of the ‘best of’ video clips captured during the live webcast.

For those who missed it altogether, no worries! Thanks to our sponsor, Translumina, we were able to broadcast the event live and are now able to stream it to you over the web using Veodia’s services.

Our moderator, panelists and energetic audience provided a great discussion on fundamental issues facing teams seeking solutions to support their collaboration needs.
Here are some of the questions that were addressed during the event:

• What is the difference between groups and teams and, respectively, group-work and teamwork?
• Why is email still being used in the context of teams even though it is not a many-to-many collaboration solution?
• Why are enterprises to blame for the stagnant progress in adopting more team-friendly collaboration solutions that will replace email?
• When is it best using synchronous collaboration solutions and when asynchronous? Who prefers one over the other?
• What are ‘high-performance teams’ and do start-ups qualify as such?

As well as some more entertaining questions, such as:

• Why does Dave Hornik hate wikis?
• When does Sara Beckman expect the Myers-Briggs test to be delivered online?

Discussion Highlights

On the topic ‘teams vs. groups’ that Sara Beckman brought up, Jane Creech provided some great insight on how groups scale up to become high-performance teams once the characteristics of teams become more prevalent.

Dave Hornik was quick to point out that start-ups, by definition, are high-performance teams yet they lack the tools to support this team-intense environment with the exception of ‘mediocre’ wikis:

I have not come across a start-up that has a software tool that really addresses teamwork in a meaningful way.

Interestingly, wikis have become increasingly a tool that start-ups are adopting…they’re horrible, they are purely about information.

In response to the moderator’s David Coleman question: “If email works best for one-to-one and sometimes one-to-many interactions, while teamwork is a many to many interaction, why are most people still using email?” Dave Hornik brought up the fundamental differences between synchronous and asynchronous communications and the demographics that constitute who prefers one means of communication over the other. As for himself, Dave needs sleep time and, therefore, async is key!

Collaboration works best when everybody is available and yet we’re all busy and running around so nobody is available at any given time. Email has become the best tool for asynchronous communications…I use it for that reason alone…We see evolution where our kids are more interested in IM and don’t believe in email…We need to find better tools that deal with asynchronous.

Who is to be blamed for the slow progress being made with more team-friendly collaboration solutions than email? According to Jane Creech, it’s the enterprise:

What keeps people from breaking out of the email cycle is that enterprises haven’t realized yet the power of team knowledge sharing systems and until they acknowledge the power of teams, email will be used.

Finally, for those of you MBA students still looking for jobs and missed our event, here’s another opportunity to get some insight on the job market prospects:

As part of our community activities and the official launch of pilot programs across global MBA programs, we are hosting a panel discussion, open to the public, on February 6, in downtown San Francisco. Below is some general information on the event and on our web site you will find more details, including a link to RSVP.  

Event: Think Out of the (In)box: Team-intensive collaboration solutions from an MBA perspective

Date: February 6, 2007, 6:30-9:00PM

Location: Swissnex, Montgomery 730, San Francisco, CA, 94111

Overview: Join MBA alumni and faculty members for a panel-lead discussion on the topic of new trends in team collaboration technologies. Leading Bay Area academics and industry experts will lead a discussion on state of the art collaboration solutions and social trends that support knowledge-intensive team projects from an MBA student’s perspective.

Panelists: Well-balanced panel of professionals, academics and analysts on team collaboration. Panelists include from the academia Dr. Homa Bahrami and Sara Beckman (Haas, UC Berkeley), Micah Siegel (Consulting Professor in Stanford and Managing Director C2C), venture capitalist Dave Hornik (August Capital), and the moderator, David Coleman (Collaborative Strategies), an industry specialist in the field of collaboration.

Today we had nice party with a toast as we officially launched Collanos Software’s U.S. operations, introduced our team, and heard from Peter Helfenstein, former Country Manager of Novell and Cambridge Technology Partners Switzerland, why he has decided to join the company.

About 50 friends of the company joined the event in the event hall of our 1850 red bricks office building in downtown San Francisco.

Pictures of the event can be found on our “Life and Fund at Collanos” blog.