Content Circles blogs

How Low are Your Expectations?

sri — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:51:26 -0700

Technology executives worldwide have convinced everyone that their products aren't really supposed to be reliable. If you disagree, read the warranty documents for almost any computing hardware, software or online solution. This has been going on for years. Microsoft Word, for example has been buggy since the day it was launched. It hasn't mattered what platform, operating system or version the application is running on top of.

Of course anyone paying attention has known this all along. From the massive power consumption of infinitely expanding server farms, to security breaches in bulletproof systems, we have all been chewing the technology gristle while the marketing guys told us it was steak. And as Lemmings, we just followed the technology talking heads….right off the cliff.

If I were reading this post from someone else, I would immediately go look at our warranty documents. Yep, similar to a lot of other companies out there. The standards for creating legal protections for your company are such that we would be foolish not to adopt the same language. Nonetheless we did not swallow the cloud hook.

"Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Screen"

We have all heard glowing stories about how customers are flocking to Gmail and Google Docs and running away from Microsoft Outlook and Office, because it was a flight to safety, security and reliability. The cloud-based applications were supposed to save us all because we no longer had to worry about the buggy operating system, PC or the applications that were installed on our machines. (psssst. All mobile, wireless and Internet Services Providers (ISPs) never go down, right?)

What the T-Mobile outage means for consumers

Google Postini Customers Fuming Over Outage

Google Outages Damage Cloud Credibility

What, hello, problems in fantasy land? In yet another example of "too big to fail" (see financial industry collapse of last year), it turns out there are storm clouds in cloud computing as well. And even though Larry Ellison ridicules Google's messaging around cloud computing as "nothing new" (he has been talking about "network computing" for years), the cloud computing hype cycle is running white-hot.

We don't buy the hype and we are not willing to settle for spin-therapy. Where are your key documents? How reliably can you gain access to them?

At Content Circles, we help companies take advantage of real team collaboration; and we don't pretend to do it for you. We help facilitate teams to share and track documents but we don't store the documents on our servers. We create and track metadata on what is happening to the files, such as sending, receiving, open, edit, check-out, check-in, etc. That information is always available to our customers and the documents always stay in your hands.

So let's review….Documents on your computer, on the computers of authorized members of your team, and your store and forward server……or uploaded to somewhere, mirrored to many other sites and all quite "secure"...Really?

You should have higher expectations and your vendors should follow through. We encourage you to give us a try if you haven't already.

Have an opinion? Let me know.

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

What's in your cloud? Sometimes less that you think.

sri — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:21:28 -0700

Ever wonder where your data really goes and who has access to it in cloud-based applications? The reality is that you can never be sure. Take the recent fiasco with Microsoft, T-Mobile and the Sidekick data that evaporated out of the cloud (pun intended). This episode reminded me of the famous Abbott & Costello routine of Who's on First: a true example of the blind leading the willing.

On a more serious note however, cloud-based vendors want everyone to believe that their applications are bulletproof and secure. With all of the examples of identity theft and corporate data loss out there, few actually believe this fantasy. If you don't control your data, you don't really know what is being done with (to) it.

That's why we took a completely different path at Content Circles. We believe that the most reliable place for your data to be is under your control at all times. We use peer-to-peer technology to move data directly between members of a work group. We don't take our customer's data and upload it to a random cloud-based application that then in turn gets mirrored to some unknown number of sites around the world.

Customers don't have to pay for someone else's bandwidth or storage, because they simply use the resources that are already available. Content Circles customers don't need IT support because the application is incredibly easy to use. Don't take our word for it: read what our customers have to say.

Give Content Circles a try with our free Personal Use Edition.

What do you think?

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

Spend your $ wisely. Why pay someone else to store and move your files?

sri — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:02:11 -0700

Our customers keep telling us we got it right.

It's actually pretty simple. Don't pay to store your documents somewhere else; always control your own files.

The Vicious Cycle of Content Management (VCCM)

The economics and the capital structures of cloud-based content management solutions just don't make sense. If you have a cloud-based system, you have to pay someone to host your data. Server farms aren't free, no matter how cheap the costs of storage. The more people that use your system, the more you have to pay and the more you have to charge. You have to charge for storage overall, storage per user, bandwidth overall or bandwidth per user. Because the bottom line is you have a variable cost of goods that scales with usage. So the more content customers put on the system, the more they have to pay.

Your numbers have to look better to attract investors, but you have a high operating cost structure. Either you have to buy your own servers and bandwidth and incur high Capital Expense (CAPEX), or incur high variable costs for ever increasing server and bandwidth requirements as customer usage and content grows. Your business model is a VCCM.

Talk about value-based pricing. The value is in the size of the disk on the server? Actually, no.

For traditional ECM, here come the in-house servers, IT staff and Support

Want to run a sophisticated ECM on site? You had better have a large organization and a budget to match. Traditional ECM solutions can be great for enterprise organizations, but the costs and limitations can be serious impediments. In this case, you not only pay for licenses and ongoing maintenance of the software, but you have to buy the servers and hire the IT staff to deploy, maintain and support that software.

What if the content management solution doesn't store the files?

We love this. The Content Circles philosophy is very simple. We don't want your files. We provide customers the ability to share, collaborate, track and manage files that are already stored on their systems. We don't charge for storage because the files are already on your desktop. It's just that simple! We don't charge for bandwidth because you are already using your existing network.

Content Circles simply maintains an index or metadata that contains information on registered users, workgroups and the disposition of all files that are placed in and shared with the workgroup. We keep track of who has opened the files, edited files, and/or created new files, and who has been added to, or removed from a circle. With a layer of powerful security developed by experts with decades of content management experience, your files only go where you want them to go and nowhere else.

Yes, it really is a great idea! For customers, the files are dramatically more secure because they never go to a third party.

Redundancy can be smart, fast and efficient….or not.

You choose. Utilize a system that uses your existing network and existing disk storage, transmits files over your existing network. Every member of the workgroup has a circle that is always in sync and replicated. Someone goes offline, no problem. Up to date data can come from another workgroup member or from a store and forward server that operates as a member of the workgroup. If your laptop ever crashes, no problem. All of your files will magically re-appear when you login to Content Circles on your new laptop.

And what about our company financials?

Even the structure of our company is more efficient. Our value-add is the ability to offer all of this capability with a low overhead. Since we only track the metadata and never the actual files, our server load and IT costs to run Content Circles are an order of magnitude smaller than vendors who take, store and hold the files. This makes us extremely capital efficient and allows us to effectively compete and thrive even in this recession.

Do let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

Social, but not too Social

rob — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:39:24 -0700

Content Circles leverages many of the qualities that are popular in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Invitations, micro-blogging, chatting, content posting, tagging, and email notifications provide the key ingredients for online collaboration.

However, unlike these social networking sites, the goal of Content Circles is not to establish a large group of friends and openly follow each other's activities. Rather, the focus is on specific project collaboration with a restricted set of participants.

For example, Content Circles makes it easy to establish new workgroup circles for each of your projects. Just invite the members you want to each circle and they will receive an invitation to join. If they already have Content Circles, they can accept the invitation in the client and immediately receive the circle. If they are new to Content Circles, they'll receive your invitation message and instructions for how they can download, install, and get started.

This two-phase invite/accept for members to join a circle ensures both parties have accepted the responsibilities of membership and have established trust. This is similar to Facebook friends but unlike the one-way follow in Twitter. And unlike both Facebook and Twitter, these circles are private so only the members of the circle have access to the content, comments, and activity tracking for the circle. Finally, instead of everyone having open access, the rights for each circle member are restricted based on the role assigned by the circle owner.

By applying the key qualities of social networking with the controls of content management, Content Circles provides the best platform for team collaboration.

The Perils and Promise of P2P

rob — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:50:19 -0700

Peer-to-peer technology has great potential. It enables the fastest content delivery possible, insures everyone has the content locally on their desktop, and leverages the full bi-directional power of the internet beyond the client-server design of the web.

From day one, our goal with Content Circles has been to develop a peer-to-peer Content Management system which complements existing Enterprise Content Management systems and guarantees the content shared amongst peers is secure. However, there are several challenges we faced:

P2P needs connectivity between peers - Regardless of whether each machine has a direct internet connection or is connecting through a firewall, peer-to-peer requires each to be able to discover a route to be able to send messages and content to each other.

P2P requires both parties to be online at the same time - When someone makes an update, that change can only be sent to the other peers that are online. If one of the peers isn't available, they can not get the update until they are online at the same time as someone who already has the update is online.

P2P has a bad rap with IT - The historic problems with Napster and other P2P technologies which violated copyright law has caused some in IT to not trust any use of P2P.

With Content Circles, we have worked to address these areas of concern to deliver a solution which fulfills the promise of P2P:

Support direct and web service assisted connections - Peers which can directly communicate can take advantage of fast messaging and transfers. For those peers which can not be reached directly, our web service hosts a forwarding service which can shuffle blocks between the peers across firewalls. All of this effort is hidden under the hood--users just add content and send messages without having to consider how it is being delivered to peers on the other side.

Note the use of blocks for passing data between peers enables arbitrarily large files to be sent. Small files or messages are sent in a single block while larger files are broken into several blocks which are reassembled into a single file upon receipt.

When not online together, use a Store and Forward node - We have purposely stayed away from hosting content for our customers to provide that extra level of security--nobody other than the members of the circle have access to the content in the circle. This does create a problem for teams spread across timezones where they may not all be online at the same time. Out solution is for someone to host a Store and Forward node which is another copy of Content Circles running on a machine that is always on. When configured as a Store and Forward node, registered users can add this node as a member and always know their content is being hosted for other members even when they are offline. In this way, you get the benefits of content hosting without the security risks that go along with pushing your content to the cloud.

This Store and Forward node does not have to be on a fast or dedicated machine. Content Circles works in the background and can co-exist with web servers and other applications on the machine. The key is having the Store and Forward installed on a machine that is always on. If IT wants to have a role in support of Content Circles, hosting this Store and Forward node is the perfect way for them to help maintain the infrastructure for a robust Content Circles implementation.

Full auditability - Content Circles tracks every action taken in a circle and provides Content Status so each member can see what each other has done. While traditional P2P systems try to hide as much history as possible, Content Circles captures this detail to help give members the complete view of their circles. This also reinforces that any actions taken in Content Circles are auditable so proper business rules must be followed.

By addressing the risks of P2P, we feel Content Circles provides the best solution for Content Collaboration without barriers.

The Future of Content Management

rob — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:01:14 -0700

The future of Content Management is the continued extension and reach of ECM systems. Much of the success of these systems to date has been the integration of document repositories with role based permissions, audit tracking for compliance, enterprise workflow, and web publishing. However, the emerging needs of team collaboration will continue to drive new functionality including:

Leveraging Social Networks
Rather than providing pieces of social networking, there must be direct integration with Twitter, Facebook, IM, and other relevant Web 2.0 technologies. Unlike blog and wiki support which many vendors have partially replicated, these social networks are all about reach and extending information beyond the corporation. Harness the fact that many users enjoy these systems outside the workplace and put the tools to use in-house. Of course there need to be safeguards and monitoring for data-loss prevention, but the benefits of user productivity and adoption are worth the effort.

Support inside and outside the firewall
Most ECM systems were designed when corporations maintained all functional teams within the organization. With today's dynamic and economic constraints, it is most likely several key rolls are outsourced whether for marketing collateral, analyst relations, development, or customer support. Rather than having to extract content from the content management system and exchange it with these outside contractors using email, FTP, or some other file exchange, ECM systems should have options for replication or exposing limited content outside the corporate firewall. Enabling this work process while maintaining the auditability and management of the content is key.

In many cases, a cloud or SaaS based offering will best address this need. The lower startup cost and reduced IT overhead offered by solutions like SpringCM, Google Wave, and Content Circles can complement investments made in the corporate ECM by providing the tools needed for distributed teams without significant cost and delay.

Desktop and Mobile integration
The biggest challenge for ECM within an organization is getting users to use it. Most users will review a new system when it comes online or is mandated by IT, but most will abandon the system when it becomes to cumbersome to use or out of their day-to-day work process. Most content is created and maintained on the desktop so ECM systems must include desktop integration to eliminate the rigorous upload/download cycle that web based content management assumes. Desktop integration should also offer local access to content so even when their laptop is offline they have their most important content with them at all times and can sync updates back when they get online.

Mobile integration would take this a step further to enable email or app delivered notification of content updates as well as potentially remote access to content for review or sharing even if the user is away from their desktop. It will be several years before mobile devices can legitimately provide anything more than a read-only experience, but remote access to notifications and content would address the majority of the need.

User-centric auditability and tracking
Gaining insight to the usage of an ECM system is key for an organization to improve adoption across the corporation. The advanced analytics most Web 2.0 web sites have today must be offered within the ECM system so active users, popular content, frequent searches, trending topics, and new uses of the system can be identified and exploited. For ECM to be a vital part of every employee's workday, careful attention should be paid to how those users are using the system and look for ways to further enrich their experience.

Uniform repository access with CMIS
The OASIS CMIS standard promises to achieve what Shamrock, WebDav, and JSR-170 have failed to do -- broad industry support for a common repository API that customers and 3rd parties can leverage to avoid vendor lock-in and enable innovative new extensions. ECM vendors should focus on providing the best tools and capabilities rather than holding corporate content hostage. With strong support from market leaders including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Alfresco, and Day demonstrating reference implementations of the standard, hopefully we will finally have the right interface for repository integration.

We are very excited about the future of content management and hope to see more and more innovation to help bring ECM capabilities to the masses. Our thanks to Julian Wraith for inviting comments on the "Future of Content Management". You can follow this topic with hashtag #CMSFuture or the MD5 tag 6f82f1d2683dc522545efe863e5d2b73.

Why SharePoint 2010 Workspace?

rob — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:49:16 -0700

Microsoft has been sharing more details about their upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. Last month they announced that Groove will be rebranded as SharePoint Workspace. This is surprising news given that Groove has been a well known alternative (P2P) file sharing and project collaboration platform. However, it reinforces the need for a strong desktop companion to web-based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems which:

Reduces the pain of the upload/download cycles
Supports offline access to content
Enables collaboration with extended workgroups who may not have direct access to the ECM system

While SharePoint Workspace will be a great addition to the SharePoint suite in 2010, it will still leave several gaps to be filled:

It only runs on Windows
It only works with SharePoint
It is a large software package to download and install
It will only be offered in the high-end Microsoft Office Professional Plus package

Content Circles addresses these needs by supporting both Mac and Windows desktops, by integrating with SharePoint, Alfresco Enterprise, and Xerox DocuShare, and by being a much more lightweight download to install on each desktop. Content Circles is also a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with a low-cost monthly or annual subscription so there is no large, upfront investment or IT support required before you can get going.

It is clear every ECM system needs a strong desktop story. For pure Windows shops, SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Workspace appears to be a great solution. For everyone else, there is Content Circles.

Catch the Wave

rob — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:16:35 -0700

When Content Circles was formed in 2007, our goal was to address some major gaps in the current state of Enterprise Content Management systems. In particular, these systems assume:

ECM requires large expensive systems that are purchased, installed, and managed by central IT
Users will adhere to a rigorous upload/download discipline for keeping the central repository up to date
All users who need to collaborate on a project can access the central repository
Users work primarily in the office and do not need remote access to their repository

The result of our efforts is Content Circles which was launched in January 2009. It is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) combined with a hosted web service in the cloud and provided as a subscription SaaS.
Content Circles enables:

Collaboration in Circles where content is only shared with the specific members you have invited
Uses P2P synchronization so no content is held in the cloud to further enhance content security
Works across firewalls and cross platform so there are no barriers about who can participate
Direct access to popular ECM systems including Microsoft Sharepoint, Xerox DocuShare, and Alfresco
Online and Offline access to your content since you always have the latest copy synchronized to your desktop
Automatic tracking and audibility of content so you know what everyone is working on in the Circle
Instant messaging is integrated with the app so you don’t have to leave the tool to chat with other members

Everyone here was excited to see the announcement of Google Wave last week at the Google IO conference. Even though Google set out to redefine how email and instant messaging work, we find many similarities between Google Wave and Content Circles including:

A Wave and a Circle are defined as a set of users working on a specific project who always need the latest state shared amongst all members
Focus is on the workgroup and the work they need to complete rather than the constraints of a traditional ECM system
Support for Mac and Windows based users
Commenting and Instant messaging integrated with team collaboration around the documents
Change tracking with the ability to track the history of project from the beginning to current day
The results of collaboration in one Wave/Circle can be published to another
We envision a rich ecosystem of extensions built on top of our APIs to expand the use of the system beyond the current implementation

The differences between our approaches include:

Google Wave is a pure cloud / browser delivery whereas Content Circles is fog computing
Google Wave has direct, character by character editing of shared documents by the multiple participants in the Wave
Content Circles allows continued use of your desktop applications rather than having to move everything to the cloud and browser based interfaces
Content Circles integrates with existing ECM systems to preserve corporate investments and allow access to historic content and ongoing projects
Content Circles allows offline productivity since you always have your content with you and can synchronize updates when you are back online
Content Circles is available today for production use

We look forward to helping users break out from the constraints of traditional systems and leverage the power of these innovative new systems like Content Circles and Google Wave to better address the needs of the modern workgroup. Together we can change the document collaboration world for the better. Catch the wave.

From Nice-to-Have to Mission Critical!

sri — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:59:00 -0700

From nice-to-have to mission critical!

This is the ultimate challenge in the business software market for new solutions. ‘How do I model my customer base to both make my products unique, effective, affordable and desirable within a viral network’.

At Content Circles, we started with the idea that workgroup collaboration and content management happens today despite the available technology and not because of it.

Speed, agility, security, one-to-many and many-to-one relationships, the ability to add and delete people in a workgroup, low cost, TCO, ROI are all fundamental requirements that are limited by the artificial constraints of current enterprise systems. These systems are just not flexible enough in their ability to adapt to the needs of today’s distributed and mobile workforces.

We have cracked the code on all of these issues, and we are now seeing the viral expansion that comes from new users being exposed to new solutions and technology by trusted peers. An invitation to join an existing circle, brief experience on the ease of use, reliability and low cost of the solution, all lead our new members to quickly imagine new applications for Content Circles with completely fresh and unique use cases.

One such unanticipated new application is large file transfer. Although many of our customers are using Content Circles to share and collaborate on content as anticipated, many are just using it to send and receive large files as they find it easier and much more cost-effective than burning and shipping CDs and DVDs; maintaining and using FTP servers; or even using web-based file transfer services that are available today.

Another such unanticipated new application is secure file transfer. Many customers, especially CFOs and HR managers, are using Content Circles to send and receive highly sensitive files such as files with social security numbers in them. We are finding that many states have laws that require encryption of such files before they can be sent via email or other electronic means. The fact that Content Circles automatically encrypts all files and the fact that even those files are never stored on any computers other than the intended recipients' computers, makes it an ideal communication tool for these customers.

We would love to hear from you about how you are using Content Circles. So please let us know how you are using Content Circles in ways that we have not yet discovered.

Fog Computing

rob — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:11:40 -0700

With all the hype these days around Cloud Computing, it is hard for people to remember there was a time before Amazon, Google, and Salesforce with their huge data centers and application hosting. It is also hard for people to believe there will be something after Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is not the solution to every problem. Users must ignore their inner voice and trust these remote applications and data centers are secure with their precious, private data. Users of Cloud Computing must accept they can only use the service when they are online. And one of the biggest flaws in Cloud Computing is the incredible power of the desktop being wasted by hosting a plain, old, kiosk browser. What we need is a way to bring the cloud to the desktop - to make it Fog Computing.

Content Circles enables Fog Computing with a rich-internet application (RIA) that integrates with your native applications to enable seamless content collaboration on documents. Instead of moving your favorite office, engineering, and creative applications to the cloud, Content Circles shares your local updates automatically with the other trusted members of your circles. Everyone gets a copy of the latest documents without having to download from the cloud and the files are stored locally so even when you are offline you have the most recent content with you. The service works both within and outside of corporate firewalls so there are no restrictions on who can participate in your circles for file sharing. And since everyone has a copy of the content, there is built-in backup/restore whenever someone loses their computer and must rebuild their circles.

For cases where not everyone is online at the same time, you can install Content Circles on a desktop that is always on as a store-and-forward. With this store-and-forward node as a member of a circle, it will always synchronize the latest content and will make it available to other members when they come online. In doing so, you still maintain complete control of your content without having to let it be hosted in the cloud, but still get the benefits of immediate synchronization when members of the circle come online.

By blending the best of Cloud Computing with the strength of the desktop, we feel Fog Computing with Content Circles is the best solution for team collaboration around content. Long live the Fog!