Web Collaboration Vendor Targets the Masses

Web Crossing prepares to turn its enterprise tools for everything from discussions and mailing lists to chat rooms and Weblogs into a broad online service.

Web Crossing Inc. is opening its enterprise-class online collaboration tools to the masses.

The company on Monday will announce its Site Crossing service that bundles together its suite of Web collaboration tools for use by small businesses, workgroups and individuals.

Web Crossing already offers enterprises its tools, which include discussions, mailing lists, chat, Weblogs, calendars, polls and podcast publishing. Companies such as Citicorp, Electronic Arts Inc., The New York Times Co. and the U.S. Army use Web Crossing for collaboration on public and internal Web sites.

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Those same tools will become available as an online service starting at $7.95 a month for as many as three collaboration tools. The pricing is based on the number of collaboration options chosen.

"This will make it possible for people without a lot of technical background to install collaboration on their Web sites," said Michael Krieg, vice president of sale at San Francisco-based Web Crossing.

What is emerging in online collaboration? Click here to read about news from the Demo conference.

Along being used to add specific collaboration features onto existing Web sites, Site Crossing can be used to build a Web site from scratch. The service provides an HTML formatting bar to create Web pages without knowledge of HTML and supports FTP capabilities and an unlimited number of e-mail addresses.

Site operators already can find many of Site Crossings collaboration features as free or low-cost online services from Web hosting companies and search and portal providers such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and MSN.

Click here to read about Googles entry into e-mail groups.

But Site Crossing integrates all of the tools, allowing users to only sign on once to use multiple tools, Krieg said. Site operators also gain a search index from all of the Web pages and the ability to control user access to specific features.

Site Crossing users can customize the design of Web pages to match the look and feel and branding of their current sites, Krieg said.

Check out eWEEK.coms for more on IM and other collaboration technologies.

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