Collanos Blog

We are excited to share important news about Collanos services with you.

Premium Voice Services
We have begun to roll out our first premium services. Collanos Phone users can now dial-out to any public phone number in the world. This service is being provided by Translumina Networks, a leading VoIP provider. Direct Collanos-to-Collanos calls on the Internet are still free of charge. You can easily purchase and add dial-out phone credit to your personal account. Simply login on our secure web site using your Collanos Name and password to access your Collanos account.

Looking Ahead
And this is only the start. Over the next weeks you will be able to choose from additional premium voice services. For instance, call-in services, local phone numbers for Collanos Phone users to be called from any public phone. You will furthermore be able to buy into powerful physical or hosted PBXs, VoIP telephone switchboards, completely integrated into the Collanos and public telephone networks, resulting in substantial cost savings.

Unified Collaboration
Collanos Workplace will integrate these voice services in the early November release. Users will be able to call contacts and establish conference calls with all team members, both on the Internet and public telephones. This will make Collanos Workplace the first unified team collaboration solution reaching beyond enterprise boundaries.

Workplace 1.3.0.3
Already back in July we launched a new version of Collanos Workplace. For thousands of users it proves to be the rock solid foundation for server-less secure cross-platform teamwork. Private users, small and large companies with their customers are using it successfully. On our User Forum and Web site you will find detailed release notes outlining all new improvements. Committed Collanos community members started translating it to many new languages.

Support Your Teamwork
This is a good time to get a taste of this unified collaboration experience. Start using it with your project teams, customers, clients, suppliers, partners as well as friends and family. You can download Collanos Workplace and Collanos for free on our download site. Premium services can also easily be purchased in the premium shop on our web site. Invite your teammates easily from your existing address books and social networks, using Collanos’ built-in invitation functions.

Spread the Word
Do you enjoy all these free services? Please help us as well. Spread the word! Twitter about your Collanos teamwork experience. Look for Collanos pages or groups on your favorite social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing or Plaxo. Join those groups and let us keep in touch.

Seit kurzer Zeit ist die erste Premium-Dienstleistung für Collanos Phone verfügbar.

Premium Sprachdienste
Für Collanos Phone steht jetzt die erste Premium-Dienstleistung zur Verfügung. Nutzer von Collanos Phone können damit jede beliebige Telefonnummer weltweit anrufen. Diese Dienstleistung wird durch den Schweizer VoIP Anbieter Translumina Networks angeboten. Natürlich sind direkte Telefongespräche im und Videocalls im Internet mit Collanos Phone weiterhin kostenlos. Guthaben für Telefonanrufe ins öffentliche Telefonnetz können im neuen Collanos Shop gekauft werden. Loggen Sie sich hierfür auf der Collanos Website mit Ihrem Collanos Namen und Passwort in den sicheren Bereich ein.

Blick in die Zukunft
Das Anrufen ins Telefonnetz ist jedoch nur der erste Schritt. Über die nächsten Wochen werden weitere Collanos Premium Sprachdienstleistungen hinzu kommen. Collanos Phone-Nutzer können dann eigene Telefonnummern zugeteilt bekommen, um von jedem Telefon aus einfach erreicht werden zu können. Für Teams und Unternehmen werden virtuelle oder physische Telefonzentralenservices ins Angebot aufgenommen, vollständig integriert mit dem Collanos-, dem öffentlichen Telefonnetzwerk und der bereits bestehenden Telefonausrüstung. Diese Lösung verspricht grosse Kosteneinsparungen.

Umfassende Unterstützung der Zusammenarbeit
Collanos Workplace wird im nächsten grösseren Release, geplant für Anfang November, obige Sprachdienstleistungen ebenfalls vollständig integrieren. Collanos Workplace-Nutzer werden ganz einfach Teammitglieder anrufen oder im Workspace-Team Telefonkonferenzen durchführen können. Dies über Internet und Telefonnetz. Collanos Workplace wird damit die erste, wirklich umfassende Teamwork-Lösung  für die Zusammenarbeit über Unternehmensgrenzen hinaus.

Workplace 1.3.0.3

Bereits Anfang Juli wurde die aktuelle Version von Collanos Workplace zum Download freigegeben. Es ist uns damit gelungen, die stabile Basis zu legen für die sichere, elektronische Zusammenarbeit ohne Server am Internet. Dies bestätigen die Tausenden von Benutzern, die bereits erfolgreich auf die neue Version gewechselt haben: Private Anwender für die Zusammenarbeit im Team mit Kollegen bis zum firmenübergreifenden Teamwork zwischen Unternehmen, Lieferanten, Partnern und Kunden. Eine detaillierte Beschreibung der Neuerungen finden Sie in den Release Notes auf der Collanos Website sowie im Collanos Forum.

Mit der aktuellen Version können Nutzer Collanos Workplace selbst in neue Sprachen übersetzen. Die Teamwork-Lösung wird somit bald in weiteren Sprachen verfügbar sein wird.

Unterstützen Sie alle Ihre Teams, jetzt

Mit den soliden Collanos Produkten ist der Zeitpunkt gekommen, allen Teams die Möglichkeit zu geben, konsequent ihre Zusammenarbeit zu vereinfachen und so produktiver zu werden. Setzen Sie Collanos Workplace und Collanos Phone mit Ihrem Projektteam, mit Kunden, Lieferanten, Partnern und auch privat in Familie und mit Kollegen ein. Alle unsere Produkte sind weiterhin kostenlos auf der Collanos Download-Seite erhältlich. Zusätzlich können nun die neuen Premium Sprachdienstleistungen im Collanos Shop gekauft werden.

Teammitglieder, die noch nicht Collanos-Nutzer sind, können mit den neuen Einladefunktionen in Collanos Workplace, Collanos Phone oder auf der Collanos Website ganz einfach zum Team eingeladen werden. Collanos Workplace erlaubt, Kontakte aus Ihren Adressbüchern und Social Networks einzuladen.

Collanos bekannt machen
Schätzen Sie die kostenlosen Möglichkeiten, die Ihnen Collanos bietet? Helfen Sie dafür doch mit, möglichst vielen Menschen Collanos bekannt zu machen. Reden, schreiben, bloggen oder twittern Sie über Collanos.  Es gibt eine Collanos Seite auf Facebook und Gruppen auf anderen gängigen sozialen Netzwerken wie Plaxo, LinkedIn oder Xing. Zeigen Sie dort doch auch, dass Sie Collanos nutzen und schätzen. Ich freue mich darauf, überall im Netz Collanos Anwendern zu begegnen. Let’s keep in touch!

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.

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.

We just picked up an interesting poll, run by Rod Boothby, asking users to vote for

tools that could be used by a large company to create a readable and writeable Intranet

Collanos Workplace seems to be faring pretty well! If nothing else, the poll provides a good shortlist of strong players in the business.

The question is quite interesting and not a trivial one. Although plenty has been written about it, I was not able to find a Wikipedia definition for “read/write web”, let alone “read/write intranet”.

Someone will have to start an article about it!

Gartner (NYSE: IT), the largest technology analyst company in the world, predicts Collanos’ type business model will become “the most significant trend affecting information technology during the next ten years.”

The Collanos’ type consumerization business model focuses on providing consumers with a collaboration platform that will allow internet home users, university faculty, small businesses, and inter-enterprise users to benefit from the collaboration tools that only enterprises have been able to provide at an expensive price to their employees.

By differentiating ourselves from other Collaboration vendors who require the use of a server, utilize a resource expensive development model, depend on longer release lifecycles, and have their own agenda that forces the need for further infrastructure investments, we gain a strategic advantage that allows us to deliver to the consumers the collaboration tools they need at prices they can afford.

David Mitchell Smith, Gartner Vice President and Gartner Fellow, predicts that our approach “will affect every enterprise.” Collanos’ approach is much like Wi-Fi’s, smart mobile phone’s, pc’s, voice over IP call’s and conference call’s, instant message’s, and the internet’s approach. Each of these was quickly adopted by consumers who benefited from the use of these technologies in their homes, families, clubs, and organizations. Consumers then took these technologies to work and caused the viral spread that later led to enterprise adoption.

Already in our beta offering, we see Collanos Workplace being not only demanded by ad-hoc teams, but by teams in the enterprise. Enterprise users refuse to constrain themselves to their current email and server based collaboration tools. Collanos, starting with its peer-to-peer Collanos Workplace, will soon provide consumers with a complete set of collaboration tools and like that create greater demand for Collanos in the enterprise.

Collanos prides itself in helping internet teamworkers and leading the evolution of the consumerization of collaboration technologies. We do not believe collaboration tools should only be available for the wealthy enterprise but should be available to everyone both outside and inside of the enterprise.

Two weeks ago, our global startup made it to the Swiss top 50 venture list published by Cash Private Equity Magazine 2006. We were competing for the number one spot with other companies such as biotech and medical equipment ventures.

This successful achievement is another milestone Collanos has achieved and we are grateful to all of you who have helped us receive this important ranking.This success is an even bigger achievement because Switzerland’s economy was recently ranked #1 in the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum in front of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Singapore and the United States. Switzerland scored highest in many categories; some of the most relevant included:

• Quality of its research institutes
• Cooperation between Universities and companies
• Education of the work force
• Modern infrastructure (transportation and
  telecommunications)
• Quality of its political institutions

Switzerland’s ranking further validates Collanos’ global strategy and our decision to start and base our company in Switzerland. Our belief is that the internet has enabled startups such as Collanos to go global from the beginning. We are already gaining many customers from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the US.

Basing our company in the most competitive global country, focusing on a global market, and leveraging Swiss quality engineering with a global development model gives Collanos a strategic footing that allows us to globally differentiate ourselves from our competitors and serve a broader base of customers faster and more effectively.

Global Competitiveness Report

The International Herald Tribune published an article on an important trend: European Internet and software companies are bringing to the market waves of relevant innovations. The following excerpts and quotes are taken from the article by Victoria Shannon:

• For one, companies expect and plan to have an international presence from the moment of inception, knowing that they can count on a more mature Internet as a global distribution and communications tool.
• And Europe has a head start in several technologies that are especially hot, according to Danny Rimer, a managing partner with Index Ventures in Geneva.
• Another particularly European niche is peer-to-peer computing, in which much of the work of conveying information on a network is handled by many small computers rather than one central server.

Collanos pretty much shares the same attributes and fits nicely in this “fire-catching” category. The IHT article can be found here.

Peter Rip, Managing Director at Leapfrog Ventures, wrote a great article about “The Coming Wave of Enterprise Web 2.0“. He and other industry thought leaders are seeing this as a major trend, the convergence of consumer and enterprise apps. He states that Collaboration can be an End or a Means, but I like the part best where Peter emphasizes why collaboration will only be enduring if it is the “Means”. Here is an excerpt from his post, containing his conclusions:

“This is why I think Enterprise Web 2.0 is different from Consumer Web 2.0. Enterprise’s have goals and structure. People around the Enterprise collaborate, but the collaboration is (supposed to be) undemocratic, i.e., ordered and non-chaotic. Ironically, this is not a new category. We used to call it Workflow and it was on the Known Quicksand Sector list at every VC firm, along with Middleware, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Search. It was a Known Quicksand because no two implementations looked the same. Users couldn’t change the workflow to suit their needs. Users couldn’t automate the dozens of little tasks of collaboration that they do every week.

Despite being Known Quicksand, nearly every VC firm has placed a bet on workflow at one time or another. Why? Because the big Enterprise Apps automate you and me and we’re done. Automating the white space between us is the last untapped source of Big Win in the Enterprise.

This is more than just Workflow. It is Information Flow. And it’s not just an inside-the-firewall problem. In fact, it’s bigger outside than inside. All the wondrous improvements in personal mobility, communications, and 7×24 information access have exacerbated the problem. Customers, field service, sales people, consultants, outsourcers, telecommuters, suppliers, etc., all suffer the rising expectations of responsiveness that comes with personal automation and the sinking realization associated with the quagmire of complexity when trying involve others.

Mobile, Web 2.0, SaaS are going to converge into a set of new, lightweight Enterprise Web 2.0 applications. Collaboration is the Big Driver within Web 2.0 and nowhere is collaboration more valuable than when time is money – the time to assimilate information from the enterprise edge and the time to organize and respond. Prepare to see a wave of Enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration applications in the next 24 months. And, like every wave, it will be 5% innovation and 95% imitation.”

It is great to read this, because this is exactly Collanos’ vision and we have been working on these concepts since 2003. Collanos Workplace connects people around the enterprise, structures cross-organizational team work in secure spaces and essentially automates the “white space between you and me”.

Collanos basically team-enables your computer! Collanos addresses the growing pains of teams being overloaded with information scattered across various communication channels, most notably congested email inboxes. Collanos allows ad hoc, cross-organizational teams to easily access, update and share team knowledge on their computers and within the context of their activities. Teams can reach their goals faster, more securely and more effectively. Team members access shared workspaces locally on their computers, communicate with their colleagues using secure channels, and Collanos’ peer-to-peer technology keeps members’ workspaces in sync. On this foundation, Collanos provides dispersed teams intuitive and transparent solutions that enable superior teamwork. The base version of the product is offered free of charge.

According to a post on Dr. Dobb’s Portal, Microsoft is pulling from Windows Vista PC-to-PC Sync, a P2P-based technology for keeping files up-to-date on multiple machines.

[... The consumer-oriented PC-to-PC Sync, however, was limited in that it would synchronize files and folders only between machines running Vista, and then apparently only between computers which had the same user account name and password (in other words, between PCs owned and used by the same person). ...]

On June 19 2006 Collanos will announce and make available a free software offering to team-enable computers. Collanos’ PC-to-PC solution is a P2P-based technology to synchronize files, business objects, group discussions and more in secure team spaces seamlessly between Windows, Mac and Linux computers.