For my upcoming piece with InformIT, I did an interview with Isaac Garcia. The following are my notes. I’m posting these because it was a great interview, but so little of the “meaty bits” that Isaac said actually made its way into the end interview.

I’ll have a similar interview with Jason Fried for tomorrow, for the same reasons.

What is Central Desktop?

Unlike most web 2.0 comapies, we are not a consumer-based application. We are a business application. We’ve created this with the intent, from the very beginning, of charging subscriptions. We are doing this for business.

We are a set of on demand collaboration tools for business teams.

Our “sweet spot” is “small teams”. Our definition of a small team is any group between 5-25 members. That team could be a department, an entire small business or a team in a medium to large sized company.

How do you feel “teams” have changed over the last 5-10 years?

The reason why dispersed teams and telecommuting works is because of the pervasiveness of broadband. Secondly, browser technology is able to support the types of solutions running on the web right now. A few years ago, browsers would simply not have been able to handle …

What I’ve found is that many of our customers are new businesses themselves, and they start off very distributed. Many times I’ll speak with the CEO of a company and their teams are distributed around the world. In the past, just trying to get permission to work from home was this huge mind shift that they weren’t willing to handle.

I would say that teams that start off dispersed are much more accepted now.

In the enterprise::::

I would say that there has been a loosening of security (control???). Before Salesforce.com came along and serviced enterprises, the idea of putting your customer list online was beyond the realm of comprehension. It was way, way beyond what businesses were comfortable. Salesforce has trained enterprises that trusting data on other services is okay.

With that barrier broken down… Salesforce has borne the brunt of that marketing effort. The security hasn’t changed on the provider end. The security hasn’t changed, but the need for absolute control has changed (their employees, their data, etc).

Collaboration tools in general don’t work if they are meant as a means of controlling your employees. The most successful collaborative tools are grown from the grassroots upward. Again, I look at Salesforce. They initially went after sales teams, and that has then grown into the rest of the enterprise (the accounting department, customer support, etc). It did not come from the top down.

How do your applications help / approach the new style of teams that is emerging?

Our main value proposition is we are trying to reduce email “spam”. “Project spam”, “team spam”, that email noise you get when 3-4 colleageus are trying to share documents, share tasks and collaborate. By working in a centralized, collaborative workspace users eliminate that spam. Instead of receiving an email notification Everytime a task is scheduled or “something” happens, they can subscribe to an RSS feed and stay up to date “passively” without cluttering up their email inbox.

What a team would do is create a workspace. They might be trying ot manage a project / group of projects or go as big as setting up an intranet.

They would then have the ability to share version-tracked files, manage group / individual tasks, milestones, harness searchable conversation threads that capture the thinking of a group or project as it evolves.

Central Desktop is built on a “wiki”. We are able to leverage the good parts of wiki technology, like creating new pages on the fly, a powerful search engine built right in, document searches, etc.

We are trying to do more than project management, we are trying to create a collaboration platform. You can do a lot of things with wikis that you can’t do with project management software. One guy wrote “you guys are the wiki without a wiki”, because it doesn’t feel like a wiki and isn’t as technical as a wiki.

What do you feel are the most important aspects of your applications?

Quick setup and ease of use.

The team doesn’t have to get IT permission. If you need something that works, you can be up in a matter of minutes. And that’s the power of Central Desktop for teams.

What are your top 5 favorite “new team” applications?

1. GoToMeeting.com: It is bread and butter for distributed teams.
2. Gmail: Doesn’t get enough respect for small teams. RSS feeds, Gtalk integration, etc.
3. Salesforce.com: Ideal for sales teams. I cant’ think of anything better, although we use SugarCRM for our stuff internally.
4. Writely: They are doing really cool, cutting edge stuff and I think it is really, really good.
5. Skype: I LIVE on Skype!

Where do you feel this industry (ie: collaborative team software) is heading?

I think the successful ones (and we haven’t done enough work here) are going to be connecting and linking themselves more to Microsoft. I think for collaborative solutions to really succeed, they need to integrate more tightly with Outlook. 67% of our users use Outlook, and we have nothing that talks to them – and very few Web 2.0 style solutions talk to Outlook.

Just as important as that, is reading RSS feeds. Business, workspace RSS feeds, inside of Outlook. Reading Central Desktop feeds inside of Outlook as if it’s email. If you read business-related in your RSS reader, it gets lost in whoever else you are reading online. More and more businesses and teams are going to segregate their reading into email based (business) as opposed to rss-reader based.