AVO Chief

When You Need Collaboration Up Quickly Central Desktop Works!

I have had several projects at Fortune 500 companies where a collaboration tool was needed to be implemented but where a department couldn’t move forward because the company hadn’t decided which tool they were going to standardize on. For example, even though other departments were using Sharepoint, it was difficult for us to get approval for Sharepoint fast enough to meet our project deadlines. So what I ended up doing was just getting my own account setup of Central Desktop and used it as my own project library.  It was actually one of my better decisions. Everyone was impressed how well organized the project was and it was easy to present at meetings on a projector screen.  I would just login and I was able to share project progress.

Central Desktop Great for SMB

Since that time Central Desktop has made some huge strides and has now even appeared as the only real SaaS Contender in the Collaboration market according to the latest Forrester Wave Collaboration Platform Report. In fact although the Forrester Wave report brought out that Central Desktop is great for small business it also brings out that it may not be ready for the Enterprise market.

The Challenge:  The Large Enterprise

“Central Desktop aims to serve small and medium businesses and departments. Central Desktop is offered in a pure software-as-a-service model and is attractive to organizations and departments that are looking to deploy quickly and easily without IT support. To that end, Central Desktop may lack some higher-end enterprise capabilities, but it’s likely that those areas of functionality are not of interest to its target market.”

And though I really like the Central Desktop product I would have to agree. Since having been involved in purchases of products for several hundreds of thousands of dollars, I have a pretty good sense of what larger enterprises might need before Central Desktop could really handle large enterprises.   Bill Ives in his Portals Blog seems to agree as well since he states that Large Enterprises are either very conservative or just not ready yet.

“It would seem that the big players are not betting on the cloud and/or the larger enterprises are not ready for it to handle their collaboration needs. Now on one hand these large enterprises are more equipped to handle on-premise solutions. Perhaps they are more risk adverse or have more conservative IT departments.”

I believe my solution is to follow the Google model which allowed them to break into the Large Enterprise by offering the Google Appliance.  Also now Microsoft is following a Software plus Service model.  So for Large Enterprises, I think Central Desktop could go with a hardened appliance that had automatic updates from the cloud and then pure SaaS for everything else.  After all in the end, the question we want to answer is what is the best solution for the client in each target market.

So that got me thinking about what I would do if I was working with the product management team.  So I have listed my thoughts below:

The Vision

Although Central Desktop earns kudos for making it to the Contender level on the Forrester Wave Report they have potential to be  not just a Strong Performer but to be among the Leader Tier.  Forrester Wave lists the leaders as Microsoft, IBM and Novell.  If the right vision and strategy was begun now I believe Central Desktop could be in the Leader Tier by end of 2010 or early 2011.

After that who knows maybe they can go after Salesforce.com which appears to be such a misnomer. Its called Salesforce so you think its just about sales but its really supposed to be about collaboration and they are a CRM – customer relationsip management tool but they have modules that do project planning and on and on.  To me this is where Central Desktop should be eventually. The name is even apporopriate to be SMB and Enterprises Central Desktop and integrated “cloud computing” platform.  This is where a growing company has to go to compete with Microsoft, IBM, Novell and Salesforce.

So what would this new and improved Central Desktop product be like?

The Feature List

Let’s take a high level view of some the features.

• First of all, what I  might do is slate their current “Enterprise” version as “Medium Enterprise” and then create a “Large Enterprise” version so that buyers would see that we were serious about this segment. What Large Enterprises need is more advanced security features and simple to use integrations with other advanced  features. Also the Cloud Ave Blog brings out that Central Desktop has done well in the SMB target market but that the larger enterprises market may be more competitive.
• “Some of it however is the smart move to target smaller organizations. Garcia notes that there appears to be stiff competition and strong embeddedness of SharePoint in companies and departments with MORE than 1000 users”.
• Although it may go against CD’s SaaS only culture, I am deeply intrigued by the appliance model and the latest Software plus Service venue that Microsoft has been contemplating.  To me for Central Desktop, this would look like like a high security hardened appliance with automatic updates done through the cloud.  The CDCA (Central Desktop Collaboration Appliance) would be installed once and would be secure, maintainable and scalable. I would at least look into this option.
• An advanced mobile pack for Blackberry, iPhone, etc and an integration pack for Sharepoint, Documentum and others.  The key is to get CD into the enterprise.  Once there the ease of use of the CD product would allow it grow in an enterprise if not all at once at least department by department.
• CD may also need to provide some more advanced content management capabilities
• Also by focusing on verticals and custom app capability the product will get stronger as an enterprise solution (for example, Legal)
• Although CD is already strong in reporting by providing some more advance reporting it will be able better to compete with the leaders.
• I have always jerry-rigged Salesforce as a inexpensive way to do project portfolio management but if CD could add a more advance project portfolio module I would never use Salesforce or any other project portfolio tool again. That would allow me to set up a project library, do projector presentations of status and then keep track of all my projects within the same tool.  That tool would go far.
• And then since I am wishing it would great if the contact manager had a facebook feel but on a professional level so that people in separate company silos would find contacts with key skills needed to solve urgent problems.  And I would also like the ability to keep PPM status with some kind of twitter like feed.  The CEO could just go to the project (twitter-like) feed page and see minute by minute progress or challenges at any time.

This all might just be a pipe dream but just in case someone at CD is watching here is what the Editions would look like.  I modified CD’s current Editions Listing to show a possible feature set:

					Medium	Large
	SMB Workgroup Edition				Enterprise	Enterprise	Community
	Team	Team	Team	Company	Edition	Edition	Edition
	Plan Free	Plan 1	Plan 2	Plan 3
Price Per Month*	Free	$25/mth	$49/mth	$99/mth	$10/mth/user	$15-65/ mth/user	$3/mth/user
Number of Workspaces	2	3	10	25	Unlimited	Unlimited	25+
Number of Members	5	10	15	25 Internal	25 min	25 min	100 min
	per Workspace	per Workspace	per Workspace	PLUS
				10 per Workspace
Total Storage	25 MB	500 MB	1 GB	5 GB	5 GB+	5 GB+	5 GB+
Max. Users Recommended					1000	1000+
Max Upload (per Batch)	25 MB	250 MB	250 MB	400 MB	800 MB+	800 MB+	800 MB+
Audio Conferencing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SSL (256bit encryption)	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom Domain & Branding	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tagging	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
API Access	-	-	-	Standard	Enhanced	Enhanced	Standard
Workflow Engine	-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	-
Security Pack	-	-	-	-	Standard	Enhanced	Yes
Software Plus Service (hardened appliance w/ automatic cloud updates						Yes with additional fee for appliance; Onsite installation Consulting
Salesforce.com Integration	-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	-
Adv. Mobile (blackberry, iPhone, etc.) and Integration Pack (sharepoint, Documentum, etc.)						Yes
Adv. Content Mgmt Capabilities						Yes
Verticals & Custom Apps Capabilities						Yes
Adv. Workflow and Reporting						Yes
Advanced Project Portfolio Module						Yes
Social (Intra/Extra) Networking w/ twitter like status updates for ppm)						Yes
LDAP / SSO	-	-	-	-	Available	Available	-
Service Level Agreement	-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes
Offsite Backups	-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes
Support	Email &	Email &	Email &	+ Phone	Dedicated	Dedicated	Dedicated
	Forum	Forum	Forum		Rep	Rep	Rep
Web Meetings	15 Attendees	15 Attendees	15 Attendees	15 Attendees	Available Call	Available Call	Available Cal
	/ 1 Concurrent	/ 1 Concurrent	/ 1 Concurrent	/ 2 Concurrent
	$35/mth	$35/mth	$35/mth	$70/mth
	Additional	Additional	Additional	Additional