Free Collaboration Software--Collanos Workplace 1.0 (Universal)

Today, Collanos Software officially introduced its peer-to-peer (P2P) team collaboration suite, Collanos Workplace 1.0, in North America. The company also opened its U.S. branch in San Francisco, setting up a dedicated team for North America led by Franco Dal Molin, President and Founder of Collanos.

Collanos Workplace 1.0 is widely deployed throughout Europe and the United States. It offers small business teams, students, faculty, and 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. Collanos is free, runs serverless, and is platform independent, i.e. available for the Mac plus Windows and Linux PCs.

Anyone can invite colleagues, friends, or partners to a team workspace where members can immediately share and organize their files, notes and links, lead discussions, and assign tasks. Collanos' peer-to-peer technology keeps members' workspaces in sync by storing a copy of the shared workspace locally on member's computers.

"In the past effective collaboration services have primarily focused on enterprise organizations," said Franco Dal Molin. "In doing so, small businesses, telecommuters, students, dispersed, ad-hoc, and cross-organizational teams could not afford licenses or the IT infrastructure to run and maintain the collaboration system."

A product description and tour of Collanos Workplace 1.0 is available on the Collanos Web site, as well as a download link. The tour's screenshots are clearly done in Windows but Collanos claims it works on Macs as well. Collanos states that it can offer the software free because it makes money off premium services offered in addition to the software. [Bill Fox]