PBworks Unveils Hosted Project Management Solution

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. 

Operators 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

Key innovations
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, knowledge bases, 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.