• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

PBworks Unveils Project Edition, Newest Product Combines Hosted Collaboration and Project Management

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 June 2009, 07:00 CDT

New Product Targets Client-Focused Agencies and Professional Services

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 3 /PRNewswire/ -- PBworks (formerly known as PBwiki), the leading provider of hosted collaboration solutions for business and education, today announced the launch of PBworks Project Edition, which combines hosted collaboration and project management to dramatically improve productivity and client satisfaction for professional services firms such as agencies and consultancies.

Professional services firms of all types, including consultancies and accounting firms as well as design, marketing, advertising, and PR agencies, can use PBworks Project Edition to collaborate with clients, share plans and gather feedback, and better coordinate the efforts across all members of their project teams (including clients, employees, and contractors). Uses of Project Edition include:

• Executing and documenting a client engagement, including using the workspace as a final project deliverable
• Managing the design and launch of a new website, from requirement gathering to final approvals
• Collaborating with a client on a new advertising campaign, including collaborative copywriting and design reviews

"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 easily 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.

For most use cases, Project Edition's multi-workspace Networks and project management functionality are the superior choice. However, there are still a number of specific uses, such as for intranets, knowledgebases, and documentation, where these features add little utility. Customers looking to meet these needs can purchase the Standard Edition.

Pricing and Availability

PBworks Project Edition is available immediately at a starting price of $20/user/month. Guest licenses for clients and contractors are free.

Existing Professional Edition customers can upgrade to Project Edition for $2,000; Professional Plus customers can upgrade for $1,000.

PBworks Standard Edition is available immediately at a starting price of $8/user/month.

About PBworks

PBworks (http://pbworks.com) is the world's leading provider of hosted collaboration solutions for businesses and education. Leading companies and organizations like FedEx, DePaul University, and the FDA choose PBworks to collaborate across geographic and organizational boundaries with employees, customers, partners, and vendors. We host over 800,000 workspaces, serve millions of users per month, and 96% of users would recommend PBworks to a friend. Over 50,000 businesses, have chosen PBworks to implement knowledge management, extranets, project management, and a host of other business processes and workflows. PBworks' investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures, Seraph Group, Sippl Investments, and Ron Conway.

PBworks is a trademark of PBwiki, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE PBworks, Inc.

Source: PR Newswire

More News in this Category