Differentiators

InstaColl is unique in three significant ways:

1. Data-centric collaboration approach

• More productive:
  • Work on the actual data within a document - not just a shared-display "raster" - why annotate and mark up documents when you just as easily review and make changes in real-time!
  • All users can save the shared document locally once the collaboration session is complete. This cuts down on iterative cycles of e-mailing documents back and forth.
    
    
    
• More intuitive:
  • Users continue to use the shared applications as they would these familiar applications in a standalone mode - only an intuitive collaborative layer is added.
  • Cuts down on time spent training users to adapt to and learn a new interface and to work in a separate collaborative workspace.
    
    
    
    
• Faster:
  • Collaborating at the data level optimizes the amount of data that is transferred between users in a real-time collaboration session. This ensures that changes are propagated much faster than screen-sharing applications and that bandwidth requirements for a satisfactory user experience is very low .
    
    
    
• More secure:
  • Sharing your desktop or your application can be potential dangerous - exposing your entire system to remote users open you up to risks such as a remote participant deleting critical files, intentionally or otherwise. Also, in a screen-sharing session, you could unintentionally expose confidential or private information to remote viewers. In InstaColl, you share only a specific document - thus cutting down on these risks significantly.

2.Contextual Collaboration Model

A breakthrough in real-time collaboration is the emergence of contextual collaboration - collaboration initiated from within a productivity application rather than from an independent application that needs to be fired up by users manually. Contextual collaboration espouses the notion that users will get the most impact when collaboration is part of their regular workflow. InstaColl is the only tool that offers a contextual collaboration model to users where they can use InstaColl from right within application contexts that they are used to and familiar with - applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point. With a single click, users can not only initiate InstaColl sessions from right within these applications, they can also set the "context" of the proposed collaboration session to a specific document that they would like to share. There is absolutely no preparation that users need to spend time on in terms of "converting" a document to a shareable format or manually uploading documents to a shared repository or meeting space.

3. Hybrid architecture

InstaColl adopts a unique, patent-pending connectivity architecture that combines the best of peer-to-peer and client-server tenets. InstaColl merges the scalable aspect of a peer-to-peer architecture with the centralized administration and 100% connectivity guarantee of a server-centric model.

Wherever possible, InstaColl sets up a direct peer-to-peer connection between users and only in the instance that two users are behind different firewalls and a peer-to-peer connection is not possible, InstaColl seamlessly routes the traffic through InstaColl's own servers. In both cases, the connections are completely secure and encrypted and nothing is ever stored on InstaColl's servers. This architecture model allows:

• Users to be connected along the shortest possible path - ensuring low latency and high performance.
• Users to be added to the InstaColl network in quantum numbers without necessitating quantum additional infrastructure investments