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A brand new software company in Chelmsford is hoping to turn the collaboration market on its ear, and is this week announcing the first general release of its self-titled product, Availl.
Availl was founded earlier this year by Craig Randall, Chuck Shavit, Ellen Ohlenbusch and Ron Lachman to address some of the issues surrounding online collaboration.
"Traditional collaboration exists in two forms," said Randall, the company's senior vice president of marketing and operations. "The first is e-mail and second is a portal. Using e-mail, people will work on a product, make revisions, changes and updates, and then e-mail all of that to every person working on the project. Using a portal, all of the work is done at a central location that many can access. Neither one of these is very efficient."
The problem, Randall said, is bandwidth and file size. If, for example, a design team is working on a new computer-aided design (CAD) drawing, the size of that file could be several megabytes. If the group is using e-mail as its collaboration tool, the pipeline will be...