Review: Webex Weboffice online collaboration suite

Collaboration and organisation are two of the most important advantages the internet can offer any business. It doesn't matter where employees are as they can always stay in touch.

Weboffice offers a means to do this effectively without an excessive initial cost for organisations from five to 1,000 people.

Weboffice does not offer productivity tools, so is not in competition with products such as the Thinkfree online office suite.

With Thinkfree, files can be hosted and shared, but the software for editing must be installed locally. Instead, Weboffice runs totally online.

Being web based, Weboffice can be used with both Windows and Mac. We also had it up and running on a Linux system.

In terms of functionality, it takes over the mantle of Outlook with calendar, tasks and contacts along with some more advanced tools.

The home page gives an instant overview of group-wide announcements, calendars, tasks and polls. Elements can be rearranged and added to suit.

A small Windows program shows meeting reminders without being logged into the site - these notifications can also be sent by email.

The contacts section includes an activity log as well as the usual contact details - an essential aspect for a salesforce keeping up to date with client activity.

Contacts can be shared with everybody in the group or kept private.

Files kept in the document storage are given keywords for later searching; full text searching is available, but at an additional cost.

You get 1GB of storage space, although you can buy more if required.

Weboffice makes use of Web Folders, which allow documents to be copied simply by dragging and dropping, just as you would when moving files around your hard drive.

The ability to create databases with Weboffice makes it far more powerful than competing products.

With templates for options such as Customer Relationship Manager, Knowledge Base and Sales Forecasting it is again easy to get up and running quickly.

One further important tool is the ability to generate expense reports.

By default, these are entered in dollars but this can be changed to one of over 30 currencies. Expense categories can be added if required.

The only feature that is lacking at the moment is full email support, although Webex tells us this should be added by July. At present, it is possible to send emails, but not to receive them.

Several upgrades to the service are available at extra cost.

These range from adding more storage space for email and files to enabling the full text search for the Document Manager and SSL encryption for all communications.

The latter is a rather expensive at $300 (£160 approx) per year.

Many of the features offered by Weboffice are available free on the internet, but none offer the same level of integration.

Weboffice can be synchronised with Microsoft Outlook and Palm devices with a 7MB client download.

This makes Weboffice far more suitable for business users as Outlook synchronisation gives access for Pocket PC devices.

Weboffice can also be used with Webex Meetings for communication and shared presentations.

Webex offers a variety of training options to make best use of the system and they will also import members into a database.

Not-for-profit organisations can get special deals, which is particularly useful given that these are often staffed by widely dispersed people.

We were also impressed that we received a telephone call from a Webex representative offering help and assistance with the trial during the initial setup procedure.

Webex Weboffice is an affordable and easy-to-use online collaboration tool, but things can get expensive if you require a secure connection.

Related reviews:
Thinkfree Online Beta review
Compose, edit and share documents online with this free office suite

System requirements:
Internet connection
Windows, Mac, Linux

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