On Message with Ben Gross

Collaboration Suites

October 11th, 2005

If the point of messaging and collaboration tools is to share information with colleagues and customers, then making it available on a web server often makes more sense than locking it up on individual PCs. While having a local store of email is good for offline reading (think on the plane), there are a lot of interesting things happening with web-based tools. Two new companies are particularly worth a look.

Zimbra, which offers an AJAX-based messaging-oriented suite, recently landed $16 million in venture funding from Benchmark and Redpoint. The Zimbra suite mimics much of Outlook’s look and feel, but has antispam, antivirus, archiving, and compliance capabilities built in. Zimbra’s Network Standard Edition is available for $30 per mailbox per year.

Joyent Connector, an appliance with a suite of collaboration tools including email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and shared applications, requires a $4950 hardware purchase, but like Zimbra is positioned as an Outlook/Exchange alternative for small teams. Michael Sampson over at Shared-Spaces has a nice analysis.

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