Joyent, a startup based in San Anselmo CA, introduced Joyent Connector, a collection of Web-based tools to facilitate team collaboration. The offering includes email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and shared applications. It is currently available for beta testing in an appliance form factor (with 1GB of memory and two 300GB hard drives for mirrored storage), and a hosted service is promised.
Design goals for the Joyent Connector were:
- Simplicity. The onsite offering ships as an appliance, for plugging into a power socket and Internet connection. The purchaser is not required to install or configure software. After installation, each user get a single username and password that works across the product suite.
- Suite Wide Tagging. Emails, calendar items, contacts and shared files can be tagged with a consistent and shared set of tags. This enables the rapid accumulation of a "virtual shared space" that pulls together content from a variety of end-user facing applications, a feature that Joyent calls a "Smart Group". Content can stay in its original location, but auto-summarize into a single list when required. It appears as though tags can not be assigned at the point of creating the item, however, requiring another trip into the item to set it. Joyent needs to change that.
- Shared Everything. Individual email messages, contact cards, calendar entries, and files can be flagged for sharing with other people on the team, or they can be kept confidential. Users can also set certain items to notify other people of their existence, a simple and quick way of keeping others informed and up-to-date.
- Shared Calendars. Users can create any number of separate calendars, and then share them with others. This enables people to get a shared perspective on what's coming up. For example, a calendar could be created to lay out upcoming milestones on a client project. Joyent doesn't appear to offer any free-and-busy capabilities.
- RSS Everywhere. RSS feeds are available for individual tools within the Joyent system, as well as for smart groups. This enables people to quickly and easily keep an eye on what's happening with a calendar, an email inbox, or an overall project.
- Platform Independence. End user requirements is for a compatible browser running on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Firefox 1.0.6, Internet Explorer 6 SP1, and Safari 1.3 are minimum requirements.
I haven't been able to test the Joyent offering, but here's my initial reaction:
- Packaging Joyent as an appliance is a good move, and should be attractive to the remaining Exchange 5.5 small business customers in the market. They can buy and deploy one of these appliances, get a whole lot of capabilities in a single offering, and benefit from low maintenance and administration. If end users want to keep using Outlook, they can do so.
- The tagging approach to creating shared spaces will be different for most people, but the concept isn't difficult. Since this is one of the key differentiators of the offering, Joyent needs to explain this well via collateral and training videos. Some direction on how to set up a business-wide tagging scheme (a "shared taxonomy") would be good too. Agreement on that upfront will minimize ongoing issues with wrong categorization.
- Joyent needs to deliver a presence and IM capability out-of-the box. For appliance customers, it would be best for it to build the capability itself ... perhaps a strategic alliance with Jabber for the code behind the jabberNow IM appliance would be the fastest go-to-market approach.
I look forward to trying it out, either in the hosted configuration, or with a Joyent Connector if Joyent want to send me one.
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