PBworks of San Mateo, Calif. (formerly known as PBwiki), announced on June 3 the launch of PBworks Project Edition, an application that combines hosted collaboration and project management. Intended for professional services firms, the product is also useful for any teams collaborating on a project.
Suggested uses of the application include executing and documenting a client engagement and managing the design and launch of a new Website.
"Collaborating on team projects has always been one of the most popular uses of PBworks," said Jim Groff, PBworks CEO. "Project Edition allows our customers to manage their projects on the same easy-to-use and collaborative platform that they've always used for doing the actual work. This organic project management is a natural result of the work itself."
Existing customers are enthusiastic about the new product. "The project management tools are very easy to use and understand," said Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital. "By combining wiki collaboration, document management, and project management, Project Edition makes PBworks an even more powerful tool for projects of greater complexity. We'll definitely be upgrading."
Other customers like Ogilvy are making PBworks Project Edition an integral part of working on client projects. "We're executing marketing programs in New York, Paris, Singapore, and San Paolo simultaneously," said John Bell, Managing Directory, 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy. "PBworks lets us manage those projects across borders without relying on the black hole that is email."
Collaboration expert Stewart Mader of Future Changes also highlighted PBworks' ability to improve performance and reduce email. "A busy manager could check the new project coordination workspace to get a quick status update, use the discussion feature associated with each task to communicate with a team member, or add a new task and assign it to someone - all without ever sending an email," said Mader. "This feature alone makes the new PBworks Project Edition very attractive."
PBworks Project Edition introduces two key innovations: multi-workspace Networks as well as Project Management.
A Network allows a PBworks customer to create new workspaces for every project and manage them in a single enterprise-wide environment. Team members can freely join any workspace in the Network and can add clients, partners, and contractors as "guest" users on the relevant workspaces. This allows a Project Edition customer to set up a custom workspace for each client, or even each client project. Users can also conduct full-text searches (including within document contents) across the entire Network, as well as within a particular workspace.
Project Management brings traditional project management concepts such as tasks and milestones to PBworks. Team members can assign tasks and roll them up into bigger milestones. Each user can view tasks and milestones for a particular workspace/project, as well as their personal tasks and milestones across the entire Network.
In conjunction with the introduction of Project Edition, PBworks is also changing the name of its general purpose collaboration product from Professional Edition to Standard Edition.
