There are many alternatives for collaborating with distributed teams online, including such well-known Web 2.0 sites as Basecamp. But the cutting-edge nature of these sites can be a drawback for some teams: flashy user interfaces and wiki-style editing have a learning curve, and reliance on Ajax techniques tends to lead to heavyweight pages. Teams in search of a simpler alternative should take a look at ProjectSpaces, now in its fourth major incarnation.
ProjectSpaces offers a tabbed user interface with the major functionality you’d expect from a an online team collaboration space. You can track announcements, meetings, and tasks, share documents or edit documents collaboratively, hold discussions, and track contacts. Just about everything can be annotated with comments, and it’s easy to send e-mail to people when you make a change (in fact, the constant reminders to send e-mail out can get a bit annoying). ProjectSpaces can also generate RSS feeds for those who want to be automatically notified of new content.
What’s different about ProjectSpaces is that the user interface is relatively simply and relentlessly form-based. Want to add an announcement or edit a task? Click a button, fill out a form, and submit it. While this isn’t as modern as inline Ajax editing, it’s easier for a broader user population, lightweight, and works well. The site does use JavaScript to drive rich text editing areas (which also strips out some functionality if you try to use it in Safari) but other than that is nearly JavaScript-free.
The other thing ProjectSpaces emphasizes in their marketing is information security. They boast controlled data center access, daily managed backups, intrusion detection, audited access, and business continuity planning – clearly, they’re aimed at the corporate market. The tradeoff here is cost. For 25 users on a single project, 500MB of storage, and very basic features you’ll pay $49 a month. More serious 5 and 10 project pricing is $199 and $299 a month respectively, and it goes up from there.
Is it worth it? I’ve had Basecamp fall absolutely flat in some teams that couldn’t get used to its relative flexibility. I suspect ProjectSpaces would be a better fit in those areas of the corporate world where Web 2.0 is as yet only a distant vision rather than a daily reality.
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