TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

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:

1. Project management (assigning & monitoring tasks)
2. Communication (instant messaging, discussion threads)
3. Collaborative editing (filesharing, file versioning)
4. 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:

1. Fast setup (no centralized repository to setup)
2. Inexpensiveness (no infrastructure to pay for)
3. 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:

1. The Collanos client has a good mix of features, a clean UI, and installs and works nicely (for a Java app).
2. Cross platform capabilities expand its usage scenarios as well.
3. A free version will drive trial usage and adoption.
4. There’s an educated, experienced team behind the app.
5. Collanos is listening and proactively responding to feedback and shortcomings.
6. Collanos uses JXTA for P2P, which with the FOSS community pushing it along will hopefully offer better functionality than Groove.
7. 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.

collaboration, collanos, eclipse, foss, groove, jeffnolan, jxta, microsoft office

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!