Upgrades Advance Collaboration

Meetingmaker Inc. and Intraspect Software Inc. are the latest software vendors to take collaboration beyond the desktop.

Meetingmakers 7.1 edition of its namesake platform extends calendaring and sched- uling into other appli-cations, while Intraspects namesake 5.5 release adds document search, access and sharing capabilities from e-mail clients.

Meetingmaker, a pioneer in calendaring and scheduling, relaunched as an independent company last week after splitting from On Technology Corp. The Waltham, Mass., company also launched in a new product direction with its 7.1 release.

Meetingmaker has opened the platform so that its desktop calendaring and scheduling applications can be exposed to other applications—such as sales force automation, customer relationship management and enterprise portals—as Web services.

"I dont really know that there is a market for calendaring and scheduling applications anymore," said David Coleman, managing director of Collaborative Strategies LLC, in San Francisco. "Its been absorbed into other things, like project management."

Coleman said these applications are still valuable when integrated with other business processes—what he calls process-oriented collaboration.

Meetingmaker 7.1 is available now, priced at $95 a seat with a minimum of five seats. A developers tool kit will be introduced in August to support Web services integration.

Intraspect, of Brisbane, Calif., is integrating document and knowledge management capabilities with e-mail in Intraspect 5.5. Through a new feature called C-mail (as in collaboration) Services, the application allows users to search for, retrieve and share documents, all from e-mail. Users send a query to the C-mail Services address, which returns links to documents in the Intraspect knowledge base that match the search. Users can check out, update and check in documents.

Intraspect 5.5 will be available next month. With C-mail included, pricing is $100 per seat in addition to the $650 per-seat pricing, based on 50 users.