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May 17, 1999

Net Teamwork

X-Collaboration's low-cost service makes projects easy

By Natalie Engler

Related links:

Collaboration On The Web

Emerging Enterprise Resource Center

And from our sister publications:

Windows Magazine Sametime Is Real-Time, Web-Based Collaboration

-Collaboration Software Corp. this week will introduce a business-collaboration tool aimed at companies looking for a low-cost alternative to groupware. X-Collaboration.com lets users in emerging enterprises work together on projects and documents on the Web, facilitating data gathering and document assembly, organization, publishing, and archiving.

Companies that sign up can avoid "dedicating resources to developing custom applications or building a Lotus Notes infrastructure," says X-Collaboration CEO Kevin Lo. The product consists of thin-client software on the front end and a hosted Java application server on the back end. Registered team members log on to the X-Collaboration.com application servers to access their project database, and use their desktop productivity applications, E-mail system, or Web browser to create content to drag and drop onto the X-Collaboration.com white board.

These files are automatically converted to Extensible Markup Language documents called notecards. Users can type directly onto the notecards, add links to Web pages, and manipulate, edit, and share the notecards with other team members who have access rights and a Web browser. The tool creates a visual layout of the notecards according to the project or document's structure.

X-Collaboration.com provides a history of document creation. It also maintains a record of who has reviewed documents and which tasks have been completed, plus a complete log of comments and E-mail messages.

Early user Martin Wartak, president of Teralon Interactive Inc. in Somerville, Mass., says this audit trail saves time for his five-person Web development company. He has used the product for brainstorming sessions and proposal writing, and says he finds it helpful to have a "visual understanding of the tasks and how the project will work." He adds that he also likes having an electronic record of the project's scope and milestones reached after a project's completion for accounting purposes. "I don't have to pore through paper files or search for a Word file or lost E-mail message," he says.

The only drawback, he says, is that there's a bit of a learning curve: "Digital document sharing is powerful, and the benefits of getting people to use it are tremendous, but you want to make it as easy for people to use as possible."

The software can run as an intranet app across a company's firewall, an extranet app without a firewall, or a combination of the two. X-Collaboration.com further protects data with Secure Sockets Layer encryption. The service is priced at $500 per year for a five-user license and 50 Mbytes of storage on X-Collaboration servers, which are located at Exodus communications collocation facilities. Additional licenses are $95 each.