Digital Practice of Law

Low Cost Intranet Conferencing

Collaboration service adds Web conferencing
2-23-04
"Collaboration services provider Intranets.com jumped into the increasingly competitive Web-conferencing market on Monday.

Woburn, Mass.-based Intranets.com sells collaboration services that enable workers in different locations to work together on documents and other common business tasks. The company has about 6,500 subscribers for the hosted service, mainly small businesses that don't want the expense and work of maintaining their own server to host collaborative documents.

"The fact there's no hardware or software to buy is very important to a lot of organizations," said Karen Leavitt, vice president of marketing at Intranets.com. "They don't want to punch a hole in their firewall to support users outside the company."

The company plans to target the same customer base with the new conferencing services. Customers can add Web-conferencing capabilities, which enable remote users to view online presentations and other common meeting functions, to the service at a flat monthly rate of $100 for up to 25 simultaneous users.

Most Web-conferencing services charge on a per-user, per-minute basis, but Intranets.com decided that flat-rate pricing would do more to entice new customers, Leavitt said."

Intranet Software Update

Microsoft updates portal package
February 2

"Microsoft released on Monday a new version of Business Portal, its package of software for creating portal sites that simplify access to corporate data.

Major changes in Business Portal 2.0 include integration with Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft's free add-on to the Windows Server 2003 operating system that provides collaboration functions such as remote access to business documents.

Integration with SharePoint will allow Business Portal users to augment corporate portals with features such as interactive calendars and announcements, document sharing and editing, and access to meeting notes, Microsoft said in a statement."