Who are we?
» The Company
» About Us
» The Founders

C A T E G O R I E S

S E A R C H

A R C H I V E S

Email as a collaboration tool sucks. Everyone knows this. Everyone says it. Everyone writes about it.

And everyone agrees that its inefficient, it’s chaotic, its silo’ed and its full of spam. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, we can assume with confidence that email is still the preferred method of ‘collaborating’ and sharing information with others.

Neither the declared “War On Email (spam)” nor the endless-parade-of-collaboration-vendors has seemed to of made a dent in the reduction of emails sent each day. A recent statistic estimated between 32 and 62 billion emails are sent around the world EACH DAY.

So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email? And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system? Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?

In short, why do we love our email?

[Side Note: I realize that few companies today are touting their collaboration services as a complete replacement for email. But my point revolves around the idea that most users are looking for alternate ways (other than email) to communicate and collaborate with their fellow business colleagues and I believe that the industry has perpetuated the myth that their collaboration software solution (plug in your company or software name here (wikis, blogs, etc) as the solution.]

So, in our attempts to improve the customer experience and increase Central Desktop adoption amongst our user base, we’ve taken a closer look at email to see what we could learn from this killer app that continues to haunt us. We’ve decided to look for the Good In Email.

Below is a quick summation of what we believe is Good about Email. The list tells us why users continue to collaborate via email rather than adopting collaboration software and it also tells us what we, as collaboration software vendors, can learn from it:

Email is Easy To Understand
Virtually everyone who has ever touched a computer understands email. Maybe it was daunting at first, but in the end, email is easy to understand. “It’s like sending a letter through the postal service, except its electronic.” People get it. The fact that so many grandparents and young children use email to stay in contact with their families and friends around the world is a testament to its ease-of-use. Likewise, after you “learn email” for the first time, all other ‘variations’ of it are essentially the same. The learning curve for switching email interfaces is virtually non-existent.

By comparison, most collaboration software solutions are difficult to understand. Many provide such a different user experience (wikis for example) that the learning curve becomes another hurdle of adoption.

In the words of Steve Krug, "Don't Make Me Think."

Email is Universal
99.9% of all knowledge workers use email. Understanding and using email has become synonymous with 'using the telephone.' Email crosses the boundaries of Language, Country, Creed, Geography and Origin. Everyone has it. Everyone uses it. This is largely because email enjoys the industry standard protocol of SMTP. The "SMTP Pipe" ensures that any user in the world can participate and interact via email, no matter what email client software they are running.

There isn't a collaboration software vendor that holds a substantive market share today that is on par with email. Talk to three different companies and they are all 'collaborating' on different platforms. Today, instead of supporting an industry standard, collaboration software vendors each attempt to lock their users into their proprietary platform and interface. Everyone is using a different package and our industry lacks a "standard pipe" to hook into. Michael Sampson wrote heavily on the topic of closed collaboration solutions late last year.

RSS is providing us with some hope in this arena (and is beginning to show promise), but in its current form, is still lacking interactivity. Not to mention that RSS suffers from neglect because it is still virtually unknown to business users and severely lacking in general user awareness.

(Because of sheer numbers, Microsoft's Sharepoint is the clear leader in the collaboration industry, but the number of businesses that actually use Sharepoint is probably statistically unknown. Just because software is bundled with something else, doesn't mean people are using it, much less understand it.)

Email is Accessible from Anywhere
You can read and access your email from anywhere without having to jump through rings of fire.

For the corporations that restrict email accessible to the office or VPN, ask yourself why every business user also has a Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail account. The surge in Blackberry, Treo and other mobile devices (primarily acting as email interfaces) speaks volumes to the point of accessibility.

Collaboration Software is still difficult to access. This is mostly for good reason as business users are, and should be, concerned with security; but the accessibility of collaboration software often falls prey to the IT department's insatiable appetite for restricting, controlling and limiting employee access to mission critical tools. To date, even the most advanced collaboration solutions only provide limited mobile device access and functionality.

Email Can Be Personalized
In spite of its crudeness, email is personalized.

Email provides the luxury of knowing who sent the message (activity alert) as well as who else is participating in the activity. And, because of email's inherent features of carbon copying and blind carbon copying, the message and alert system is relatively prioritized. The importance, or weight, of the email message is often measured by the number of people included in the carbon copy.

Its also just as easy for the user to quickly include or exclude participants based on the activity or task at hand. With email address quick-fill, alias mapping and email groups, broadcasting activity alerts and messages becomes very personalized.

Most collaboration software really starts to breakdown at this point. The "easy-to-use" collaboration products simply avoid personalization. Most enterprise collaboration tools provide highly personalized features.....but who uses them? Its too much work or costs too much money to be viable.

Email is Manageable/Configurable
In addition to being personalized, email is manageable and configurable. Both novice and intermediate level email users can create rules for filing, routing and managing the data flow of email. Email has enjoyed a renaissance recently thanks to products like Gmail, Sproutit's Mailroom and Yahoo web mail; all which provide richer tools for managing and configuring email.

Collaboration software vendors usually fall into one side of the ditch or the other when it comes to providing a balance of simplicity or configurability. Email has the unique qualities of being simple enough for beginners but configurable enough to accommodate advanced users. This is something every software vendor strives for, but rarely achieves. Fortunately for email software vendors, the simplicity is inherent to the medium, not the interface.

Email is Searchable
The sudden resurrection of desktop search by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google (and others) finally solved the common of 'I never delete email' syndrome that plagues more email users than any of us care to admit. Gmail clearly leads the pack in this feature; but lets not forget the little company that Microsoft quietly acquired last year, LookOutSoft, which provided the simplest and fastest way to search your Outlook PST files.

Some early players like Enfish were ahead of their time when it came to combining search with collaboration. New collaboration software vendors are finally starting to understand the tremendous power of search combined with collaboration. Most collaboration software is about 'fixing' the broken systems that business teams are struggling with to collaborate: such as document management, file storage, revisioning, share weblinks and bookmarks. The value of each of these systems is increased exponentially when a powerful search component is layered on top them. Search tools in Collaboration Environments MUST provide FULL document text search for all popular file types such as Word, Excel, PPT, PDF and HTML. Anything less is useless to the user and begs them to return to searching their own email boxes for answers.

Email is In Your Face
Perhaps the single biggest reason why users reject collaboration software and revert back to email is that Email Is In Your Face. Like Instant Messaging, email is highly disruptive, but it works.

Dovetailing into the previous points of Personalization and Manageability, each user can determine the level of attention they want to allocate to email and alerts. A user might check email every 30 minutes or every 60 seconds. The user can then determine how they want to be disrupted by either displaying a systray alert or a pop-up window every time a new email arrives (or if you are on a mobile device like a blackberry, you can set it to vibrate, flash lights or sound an alert upon receipt of a new message). In other words, email is “in your face,” “intrusive” yet, highly personalized and configurable.

Most collaboration software vendors completely miss the mark on this point. Many vendors send an email alert every time an activity occurs (thereby creating more spam for the business team). This solution RARELY works because the tool isn't providing the users with the same level of personalization and manageability that email provided them in first place! Other vendors error on the side of caution by not providing any email alert system or by not providing an RSS feed of activities (such tools are doomed to fail from the beginning). While some provide RSS feeds about group activities the feeds are usually of low value to the business user. Low value meaning, lack of security (few vendors provide SSL or Authenticated RSS Feeds), confusing or meaningless titles, no user interaction with the feed, not personalized (receive all activity information or none) and impossible for novices to understand or grasp.

Email Just Works
Let’s make this really simple. Email just works. It’s chaotic and overwhelming, but it works most of the time and there is no learning curve. A new employee can sit down at their new desk and they can immediately start sending and receiving messages, participating in email thread conversations, stay apprised of events and even delegate tasks; all without having to learn, navigate or configure a new interface. And, if that person wants to retrieve information from previous projects or historical data all they really need to do is open and search their Gmail or Yahoo account which they were probably forwarding most of their email to anyways.

So where does this leave us? This short examination of email reveals that there are a number of hurdles that continue to plague the collaboration software industry. In spite of its shortcomings, email continues to be the de facto standard for team collaboration. Is there a need for advanced collaboration tools in business teams? Yes. Will business teams continue to rely on email as their primary means of communication? Yes. Is there room on the business desktop for collaboration tools? Yes, but the tools better be simple and they better be easy to use, and, they better just as easy (or easier) to use than email. Central Desktop has taken steps to address each of the points listed above (and will continue to address them in the future), but I'll reserve those details for another post.

Am I suggesting that we all abandon our collaboration dreams and submit to email? Absolutely not. As a fellow collaboration software vendor, though, I think we've got our work cut out ahead of us. Mass adoption isn't around the corner. In order for any of us to succeed beyond the outer rings of the blogosphere, we must look closely at the single most successful medium to enter the business world in 25 years. We must take a closer look at this killer app and apply the same rules of simplicity and ease-of-use to our own products if we ever expect to become more than a cottage industry. To succeed, we must look back and learn and apply what we've come to understand as the Good In Email.

Digg This!

---

Central Desktop was given an Honorable Mention for the Web 2.0 Awards (as organized by SEOMOZ.org.). For a product that has been around for only six months, we are very pleased and proud to wear this badge.



Central Desktop was mentioned in the Business, Money and ECommerce categories behind: LinkedIn, Basecamp and SideJobTrack

Special kudos to SideJobTrack for taking Third Place. Its a testament to your success for being mentioned along side two companies that have been around for over two years.
(Basecamp, as a product, and LinkedIn, as a company, are both over two years old. 37 Signals as a company is even older.)

The winners were selected from over 300 companies in 38 categories. Click here to nominate Central Desktop again for next year's award!

---

In our constant effort to build on our mantra that Good Collaboration Has Good Search, we are proud to finally announce that Central Desktop has added Powerpoint Files to the Central Desktop Search Index. Until now, Powerpoint files and their contained text were not included in Search Results.

While Central Desktop Search has always supported Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe PDF, HTML and txt file indexing...we've been sorely lacking in not supporting Powerpoint. Many of you have been requesting this feature for several months. Thank you for your patience. Adding Powerpoint File support to the Search Index was actually more difficult than we ever thought it would be. But, alas, we've done it.

Many thanks to our resident Lucene Search Expert Monsieur Tropo!

---

The San Francisco Business Times is reporting that NetSuite (a leading on-demand "mini-ERP" solutions for small and medium sized businesses) is planning to IPO later this year.

With the stock success of Salesforce and RightNow Technologies still in the air, the NetSuite IPO could be another shot in the arm for software investors trying to find real value in the Web 2.0 Hype.

In the midst of the consumer-driven Web 2.0 hype, we are glad to see a shift in investor interest for On-Demand Business Solutions (Software As Service) in both the Enterprise and SMB Markets.

---

Just a quick announcement that Central Desktop now offers UTF-8 support for character encoding (otherwise knows as Unicode). Until today, Central Desktop supported ISO-8859-1 (also known as "Latin1") character encoding which created character discrepancies for our international customers as well as customers that used heavy scientific annotation.

UTF-8 allows users from virtually any language to now use Central Desktop, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hewbrew, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cuneiform Hieroglyphs and many, many other languages.

And, in case you were wondering....as a result of the UTF-8 conversion, Central Desktop also supports JRR Tolkien's Tengwar and Cirth Languages - recently repopularized by The Lord of the Rings.

Being that 20% of our customer base and prospects are from international communities, this is actually of greater significance than most of us can appreciate. We've been listed and referred to on many international blogs and we will never know how many users we alienated because of our limited character support.

We released this over the weekend and we've already received high praise from many of our customers. Many of our international customers were forced to use Central Desktop in English Text with their colleagues. This, obviously, created large adoption hurdles for the rest of the team to jump over before they could appreciate the value of using Central Desktop.

To say the least, we are very thankful to our international community for their patience and understanding with regards to the character shortcomings that they have experienced. Thank you all.

The actual conversion process from Latin1 to Unicode was a laborious procedure that is worthy of recounting in a future blog posting.

For the benefit of our techie audience out there...A piece of wisdom that we learned from this experience was: "Start off, from the beginning of your development cycle, with UTF-8 / Unicode Character Support, rather than 'dealing with it later.'"

---

Today, we are happy to officially announce the Central Desktop Affiliate & Referral Program.

Now, you can earn cold, hard cash everytime you refer someone to Central Desktop and they sign-up as a paying customer. Depending on the Plan that they subscribe to, you could earn up to $249 for each referral !

Anyone can sign-up to be an Affiliate and there is no limit to the amount of money you can earn (as long as your referrals are converting to paying customers).

Click Here To Learn More About the Affiliate Program.

To become a member of our Affiliate Program, you must have a Central Desktop Account.
If you do not have a Central Desktop Profile, click here to create your Central Desktop Account now.

Once you are logged in to Central Desktop, go to the "My Account" link in the upper right hand corner and select the Affiliate Program Tab.



After you accept the terms of the Affiliate Program, you will be directed to a page with your very own Affiliate Code, Banners, Badges and Logos that you can post on your Blog, Email or Website.

So, sign-up as an affiliate, post our logo on your Blog or Website and start making some easy money.

Technorati Profile

---

The online collaboration space continues to heat up!

Just announced, Google Acquires Writely.

Congratulations to Writely for a job well done! Let the games begin.

---

Central Desktop File Drop Zone is here.

Most web services (including Central Desktop) provide users with the familiar button as the primary means of uploading files to the web.

The good thing about this method is that its easy for developers to code. Its a fairly simple process to enable on most websites. The bad thing about this method is that its painfully inefficient for users.

Most of the time, the Function only allows users to upload one file at a time. This is not only time consuming but most users have a difficult time navigating to their computer desktop folder to access the most popular files - besides- what if the user needs to upload multiple files?

At Central Desktop, we've explored alternative options for uploading files to the web (WebDav, Installable Client Applications, FTP Configuration, Partner Programs) and we decided on the option that provides our users (and our company) with the most bang for the buck.

Our final decision was based on the following criteria.

The solution must:

1. Allow for Drag & Drop Functions from the Desktop
2. Allow for multiple file uploads
3. Be available to our users quickly (days, not weeks)
4. Be 100% web based

Based on the above, we decided to beta-release a service (for lack of a better name, we are calling it the Central Desktop File Drop Zone) that enables users to easily drag and drop files from their local computers into Central Desktop.

The File Drop Zone is launched from the File Manager within a Central Desktop Workspace. Clicking the File Drop Zone link will launch a small window that displays the Workspace and File Folder Name:



Once the window is opened, users can move it to any part of the computer screen. Any files dragged into the File Drop Zone window (up to 25 MBs) will automatically be uploaded into Central Desktop.

A bonus feature of the File Drop Zone is that all image files, such as JPEG and GIFs, uploaded through the Drop Zone are automatically optimized and resized for faster uploading and quicker viewing.

So, say goodbye to the Button forever. Launch the File Drop Zone and Drag Away!

---

Central Desktop made it over to Barcamp Los Angeles Saturday Night along with 70 other local technologists. It was exciting to meet other techies from the Los Angeles Area. And, the beer was good (free). Hopefully this is the start of a uptrend?

The event venue was the Little Radio Warehouse just south of downtown Los Angeles. While we probably weren't the largest Barcamp in the country, we were definitely the hippest and coolest:





Here is the entire Flickr photo stream.

Here is a picture of me (Isaac Garcia) giving my intro.

Special thanks to Jason Roberts, Kareem Mayan, Sean Bonner and Ian Rogers for organizing the event.

I'm only disappointed that we didn't meet everyone and that we didn't attend on Sunday.

---

In preparation for an article he is writing for InformIT, the infamous Jeremy Wright interviewed Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop and Jason Fried of 37 Signals a couple of weeks ago as fodder for his piece about Team Software Applications.

Jeremy posted the notes to the interviews on his blog. You can read them here.

We particularly like Jeremy's open-kimono style that he applies to blogging and journalism. By posting his interview notes at his blog, Jeremy is embracing the original spirit of journalism. While such journalistic transparency might make Jeremy vulnerable and exposed, its also honest and truthful (both traits that we all look for in good journalism).

In today's world where we all yearn for more transparency from business owners, politicians, parents and teachers, I believe that journalists should be held to the same standards.

We'll be sure to post a link to InformIT article when its released.

---

Back Next

F E E D S

R E C E N T    E N T R I E S