Collanos’ “Virtual Meeting Room” Now Available in English and German

Collanos Workplace releases version 1.0.2 and now offers its free cross-company, cross-platform collaboration solution in English and German. Collanos Workplace allows teams to work together over the internet more efficiently, flexibly, and securely. They can access shared information such as contacts, discussions, documents, team calendars, tasks, and projects. Now, users can switch between English and German as Collanos takes the first step into localizing its global software.

“Tens of thousands of users have already installed Collanos Workplace on their computers, and every month we see a 130% growth rate,“ said Peter Helfenstein, CEO of Collanos.

With offices in Switzerland and USA, Collanos expects to further accelerate this rapid growth with the German version. “Over 25% of our users originate from Switzerland, Germany and Austria,” says Helfenstein. “With the German version, we will become even stronger in the Germanic region.”

Typical Collanos users are MBA students, small to mid-size businesses, non-profit organizations, and mobile work groups in large consulting companies seeking cross-organizational collaboration solutions. Users all commonly share the need for a flexible collaboration platform that spans several locations in order to optimize the workflow with colleagues, customers, providers, partners, and remote employees.

These users require that all team members have access to the latest version of documents and that all project-related discussions, emails, and other content are easily accessible in a shared environment. Since Collanos supports all major operating systems, users can always invite additional members to their workspaces.

“As a small company with globally dispersed employees and countless partners, we suffered from overflowing email inboxes and endless attachments,” recalls Alex Fries, CEO of PURE SWISS Inc. in San Francisco. “Thanks to Collanos, we are now able to work as a ‘virtual team’ in a secure, structured environment, and in the context of our teams. Without Collanos, we would have had to invest in an expensive and complex collaboration system limiting us to a closed network.”

Reto Hartinger, a Swiss Internet expert, believes the free software has great promise, “Although Collanos is not yet as powerful as some of its older siblings, Lotus Notes, Sharepoint, and Groove, it will rapidly gain market share especially with innovative companies and collaboration within teams with high member turnover.” Hartinger also sees huge potential with lawyers, software developers, marketing agencies, and universities.

Peter Helfenstein added, “The German version was translated entirely by volunteers in our user community. This will happen with upcoming languages as well. Collanos will work with the community to maintain these versions.”

The software is available for free and can be downloaded at www.collanos.com