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Collanos P2P Project Collaboration - Please be better than Groove
A few weeks ago, even after I posted an unflattering list of suggestions for Teqlo, Jeff Nolan pointed me towards beta startup Collanos - a new entrant into the ad-hoc team collaboration space.
CSCW Backgrounder
“Team Collaboration” (or popularly “Computer Supported Collaborative Work,” or CSCW) defines a suite of services that spans:
- Project management (assigning & monitoring tasks)
- Communication (instant messaging, discussion threads)
- Collaborative editing (filesharing, file versioning)
- Team & role management (inviting members)
…all of which is packaged together in a single application to allow for streamlined, one-place management of all resources/information associated with a particular project (each of which gets its own shared “workspace”). Compared to the ordinary mishmash of disconnected email threads, files scattered across network drives, and so on, CSCW apps like Collanos have a compelling value proposition.
The P2P Angle
Collanos differs from something like SharePoint by maintaining workspaces via P2P, as opposed to a centralized server infrastructure. This means that each Collanos client updates its neighbors, who update their neighbors, and so on - and collectively, the entire team stays in sync. The advantages are:
- Fast setup (no centralized repository to setup)
- Inexpensiveness (no infrastructure to pay for)
- Flexibility (teams can grow or shrink without performance hit or centralized admin overhead)
I had a blank test workspace up and running in about 3 minutes from the time I confirmed my registration online.
The Downside of P2P and CSCW
Scalability. P2P ironically doesn’t scale well in a CSCW setting. Or it didn’t for me - I had the unfortunate experience of using Ray Ozzie’s “Groove” with a team of 60. Every morning, my Groove client would spend hours trying to resynchronize its multi-gigabyte local repository. So would everyone else’s, bringing the office network to a halt and making everyone’s pc’s unstable while Groove ate most system resources. If you took a day off, you were better off to uninstall Groove and start fresh than to try and re-sync.
Conjecture #1: Downloading music and video is not mission critical. Synchronizing a shared workplace is. P2P inherently can’t offer a guaranteed “service level,” making it unsuitable for mission critical apps, however appealing it may be conceptually.
Confusion. Once you actually get sync’d, hope for the best - there’s nothing like finding 15 different versions of a file that different people worked on over night, among which yours is not included because it didn’t synchronize, or whatever &*#@%^$!# (the “Last Modifier Wins” scenario).
Human Nature. Finally, there are many who question the utility of group-targeted applications at all. Given that you’ll be stradling both the groupware world of Collanos and your regular individual desktop-type functions for work outside of Collanos, groupware can create a layer of overhead that results in slow and fragmented adoption by teams - which further decreases utility, leading to user drop off, and so on. This comment is based on experience: with Groove, users and usage declined more or less linearly over a six month period until the beast was finally killed.
Perhaps Collanos and Groove work better for smaller teams (5? 10?) with limited file volume - I don’t know. It begs the question though - would a 5 person team find value in a collaboration tool? My understanding is that collaboration tools are fundamentally intended to streamline work across larger groups, as with a small group its relatively simple to stay organized. I can see CSCW being useful for small, geographically distributed groups - but this is a very small target market on which to base a business.
Conjecture #2: Any group small enough to consistently use a CSCW tool without experiencing user-base fragmentation or overloading the P2P architecture is small enough that the marginal value of a CSCW tool will be very low.
A Harsh Prognosis for a Good Application
My analysis has been colored by a terrible experience with Groove, which Collanos strongly resembles in appearance, functionality, and architecture.
That being said:
- The Collanos client has a good mix of features, a clean UI, and installs and works nicely (for a Java app).
- Cross platform capabilities expand its usage scenarios as well.
- A free version will drive trial usage and adoption.
- There’s an educated, experienced team behind the app.
- Collanos is listening and proactively responding to feedback and shortcomings.
- Collanos uses JXTA for P2P, which with the FOSS community pushing it along will hopefully offer better functionality than Groove.
- Marketing - say what you will about promotions, but Collanos is working hard to sell itself in the Bay Area.
So - while I’m not bullish on the CSCW space in general, if anyone’s going to dispel my bleak outlook, its going to be Collanos. I’m looking forward to following their ongoing development and seeing how Collanos in the North American market.
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10 Responses to “Collanos P2P Project Collaboration - Please be better than Groove”
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[…] 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), […]
This by far is the most thorough and thought out Collanos Workplace review we have seen on the web. Thanks for this comprehensive analysis!
Just wanted to add a couple of comments:
1. I agree with you that 60 people in a workspace is an overload for a P2P based solution that needs to be synchronized between all members. We recommend users to limit their workspaces to no more than 10/15 members (You can still have over 60 members you work with spanning over multiple projects but not all in one workspace).
That being said, we believe there is an enormous market out there of teams that work with 3-10 members on a project. Many of us do not have access to enterprise-level team collaboration solutions or are not satisfied with the current ‘CSCW’ solutions (e.g. Sharepoint, Groove/MS, Notes, or the many hosted solutions available) for many of the reasons that you listed above (IT support, resources, usability, cross-platform, data security, etc.). Team intensive settings such as VCs, researchers, students, marketers, start-ups, NGO, need to be able to form ad hoc teams and work across organizational boundaries. Without any exception, they all end up using email, hence, our tagline, Think Out of the Inbox.
2. This week we are coming out with a new release that will hopefully dispel your bleak outlook about Peer-to-Peer based team solutions. The emphasis in this release are two-fold:
A. Performance and Reliability
We are addressing the point well said above about how hard it is to rely on a P2P solution for mission critical content being shared by a team. Users will no longer be experiencing lost files or sync issues. We have poured endless dev time into this feature alone.
B. New Features
Our Conflict Bin will address the point you had mentioned about last-to-make-changes, wins. From now on you will be able to restore previous versions if needed. In addition, we are launching our CUD (Central User Directory) that will allow you login/out of the system adding yet another layer of security to your data. Offline invitations will be possible from now on with the new CUD.
One more major feature is still being kept from the press, but I can allude to, relates to the most populated country in the world…
Comment too long? My apologies.
Please visit our site soon to test the latest from Collanos and be sure to send us your feedback and update your blog. It counts!
Gil - thanks for stopping by! Long comments are always welcome - especially when they’re full of news and insight like yours. Agreed that 3-10 member teams sounds like a market “sweet spot” for you, and I’m looking forward to following Collanos as your new features become public.
All the best!
-Rod
I just downloaded this 45MB baby. Despite of the big fat size of the download, the overall UI designs are pretty elegant.
Collanos is comparable to SharePoint, Version Control programs and “Web 2.0″ collaboration Web services, with outstanding bonuses of P2P and off-line mode, as well as crossing platforms as desktop program.
I would presume that the Collanos team had plan of introducing p2p audio/video chat into the program, either through in-house product or integrating with existing services like Skype and MSN etc.
After all, Collanos might still face a lot challenges of market competitions as it is possible that MS, Skype or other p2p vendors will develop similar products.
Hey Andy - I believe Collanos is planning on adding voice/conference call functionality within their own platform (i.e.: not via skype etc). Groove has had functionality like this at least since I used it several years ago, so I wouldn’t think that would give Collanos a competitive edge in the “professional” market; that being said, the small team segment that they are targeting might be more receptive. The fewer apps involved in their CSCW setup, the less maintenance/setup overhead.
-R
[…] It’s pro’s and con’s are reviewed here by Techfold. […]
Hi Rod and Rod-readers,
We just came out with a new version this week, Collanos Workplace 1.1, with MAJOR enhancements and features, including the new Conflict Bin, allowing you to restore overwritten versions and a Central User Directory (Offline invitations, Sign In/Out and easy find Collanos members).
If you have a chance, please give it a try and send us your feedback (support AT collanos DOT com).
For those of you who still have the previous version, just run the application and you will be prompted to update. Keep in mind that with this new release users need to create for the first time a Collanos Name and Password.
If you are creating a fresh install, be sure to remove older installs and data.
Release Notes are available on our user forum (highly recommended!).
http://community.collanos.com/index.php/topic,811.0.html
Cheers,
Gil - Collanos Software
[…] Collanos provides the core functionalities of Groove, namely the creation of workspaces synchronized via peer-to-peer technology. I won’t go into the technical details, because overall, everything is nicely done. There should not be any major issues related to data security, data staying on a server, etc… The latest version improves the replication algorithm, provides with conflict resolution feature, and other nice improvements. You can find more about the technical aspects in this TechFold post. […]
[…] blogging here. Some reviews have been actively commented on over time by the company reviewed - take a look at the Collanos post, for instance: the Collanos folks are all over it with opinions, other ways of looking at things, […]
[…] online? And then build in the tools to do it. Or partner with a company that has already built great open source software for just that–such as Collanos–and find a way to actually help those looking to […]