Kubi Offers New Slant On Collaboration
For
some time now we’ve been waving our finger in the breeze and
getting the feeling that new software for office users is coming.
Kubi’s
new collaboration software seems to belong to that breed.
In
its first iteration, shipping now, Kubi is a Peer-to-Peer Client
that sits on top of (or maybe next to – you’ll have to decide)
your Email system and lets you collaborate with the members of your
various teams – inside and outside your company, wherever
they’re located.
The
amazingly clever thing about it is that it’s entirely user driven.
If a user wants to set up a new project, task, group, coven
– you name it – he does so.
Inviting others to join sets it up on their desktops, too
(actually it asks permission first).
Anything that one group member drags and drops into the
shared space then immediately shows up in all the other member
spaces. Magic!
No IT staff required and no server.
Entirely self service in the best tradition of the Internet.
The
shared space automatically synchronizes so that all the spaces are
always equivalent. Only
invited members can see what’s in a space.
Documents are shared by sending them across the Internet, but
they’re encrypted using a public key (don’t worry, users
aren’t involved in understanding the process), so they’re quite
secure.
Kubi
supports discussions, documents, calendars and contacts, to do
lists, timelines, and team folders.
Users can see all this in a variety of ways, depending on how
much they want to stay in Email (Outlook or Notes) and how much they
want to see more of their Kubi Shared Space (but you can see both of
them in any case – it’s just how you do the trade-offs.
The
Peer-to-peer notion is so cool that I wasn’t sure I liked the idea
of having an Enterprise version (available in July), that adds a
Server. Servers mean
the involvement of IT and the assignment of resources.
Kubi’s founder, Julio Estrado, hastened to assure me that
users didn’t have to give up being in charge.
The server is to let Kubi spaces be backed up and archived.
IT can simply provide enough space so that the users are
largely unaware of the process – server space is cheap enough now
that this philosophy seems possible.
We’re
not so sure that IT will be willing to give up being in charge.
To us, to take away user control would take away some of
Kubi’s charm.
Kubi
is priced to allow experimentation. Kubi clients are $149 each.
Only Kubi space creators need them – guests can use Kubi
without any additional software.
Of course, volume discounts bring the price down.
Sales VP Ed Jacoby indicated that in a large organization
(say 10,000 users), clients might be $40 each.
The Server, available first only for Windows 2000 and 2003,
will be $7,000. It will
be available for Linux next year.
We’re
watching a lot of interesting next generation office software.
We’ll be writing about more of it – from existing and new
vendors – very soon.
