For this week’s newsletter we take a look into the exciting world of collaboration via a new product called Collanos Workplace. Personally I was excited to test this product because I feel workplace communication and collaboration is weak in most companies. I know we have had trouble here in the past making important information about projects readily available and easy to work with, and finding a product to help the process without adding extra work has been a challenge, until now..

Basically Collanos Workplace is a software application that runs on users’ local machines and offers an easy way to create projects and collaborate with regards to documents, files, discussions, tasks notes and websites. It needs to be installed locally on users’ computers and therefore cannot be accessed via a browser, but honestly I found the interoperability via a client much better than most online collaboration tools I have used. Creating new workspaces (projects) is extremely easy, and adding, changing and deleting files is simple.  As well, I found the overall interface well thought out and enjoyable to use.

Some Testing

To get a better understanding of the maturity of the product (keeping in mind it is a 1.1 release), I created a number of sample workplaces and invited a few different groups here at AWH to join in. You do need to register online to create a user and all members of your team or company will have to do the same, which overall is understandable and fairly painless. It would be nice however, if Collanos released a server side to the environment allowing for this process to remain internal for more sensitive clients. They are good at pointing out all communications are encrypted though which is good enough for now.

The first project I created was for sales and marketing collateral materials. I created the basic workplace structure to mirror a few sample sales initiatives and grouped the collateral material and working documents into my newly created structure. At this point I invited the sales team to join my workplace and had the team interact with the material through a series of real-world tasks. Generally uploading and maintaining files and documents was extremely easy though initially it took me a few minutes to figure out how the updating process worked. Basically, when you open an existing document through Collanos it opens it in a temporary location, so just make any changes you want, hit save (not save as) and close the document. When you go back to your workplace it (Collanos) will notice the changes and ask you if you would like to update the document - just say yes. An easy process once you do it. Overall the team liked the application in regards to both the usability and the functionality.

Second, I wanted to test the Collanos system with a little bit of sensitive data. I created a technical project for my engineers and added my structure and a sample network topology diagram. Obviously if you don’t want a particular user to see the data don’t invite them to the workspace, but if you want them to see data there are a few permission levels you can set. After trying this part of the system though it appears to me it needs a little work before it is ready for corporate use. For example the initial team members I invited to the project were invited as managers with full access. I would have liked the ability to set this as I was making the invitation, especially seeing that there is a lag in the effective permissions taking hold once you change them, due to the Collanos server being hosted externally. Another issue during the testing of permissions-changing, booted the user from the project leaving no easily identifiable way to find it again.

Throughout the testing process I noticed a few things I really liked, for example:

• You can move your project data folder to your network drive so items will be backed up (assuming your server is backed up).
• It only takes a few minutes for new users and new workspaces to become available via the Collanos servers.
• The user interface was well thought out and easy to use.
• New files, objects and changes are marked well and easily identified.
• The messaging component works well via static messages and instant messages.
• The fact that everything is encrypted is a must and well accepted.
• The concept of discussions as files stored in the shared workspace is great, especially for remote users and long running projects that aren’t necessarily rush jobs.
• A conflict bin that stores items that have been changed or deleted by other users is a great way to help recover from mistakes.

For all of the pros of the software I still think it has a little bit of maturing to do to be accepted in the enterprise, for example: 

• The permission’s system is very basic, when working.
• You cannot set different permissions on a document/folder basis so you need to create multiple projects (workspaces) to limp around this.
• Administrators should be able to set access while inviting users instead of after they have been created, especially seeing as though there seems to be a lag in the propagation of the permissions once they are set.
• One of our users running Vista could not get the application to install after many attempts which will become more and more of a problem as users continue to move to the new windows operating system.
• It would also be nice in future revisions to have a preview pane system to view documents before opening them.

Overall I say the application is great for small companies and small workgroups but it has a little work to get to the enterprise level.  But considering this is revision 1.1 I would keep a close watch on it!

Online Resources

Jesse’s technical view of Collanos
http://www.awecommwebhosting.com/blog/?p=38 

Collanos’s Website
http://www.collanos.com

Collanos Workplace 1.1 Download
http://www.collanos.com/m1/en/downloads/index

Collanos User Foum
http://community.collanos.com/index.php/board,21.0.html

Filed under: Business Articles on July 17th, 2007 |