SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Office On the Web: HyperOffice

May 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Office On the Web: HyperOffice

TAGS: Worthwhile Web Sites

There are a number of team-tool/collaboration sites on the Internet. But many of them fall short when you really try and toss some work at them. Probably not the case with HyperOffice, however. At least it better not be, based on its features and price.

First off, it's really three products instead of one. The team collaboration tools are one bit, then there's the portal-based document management and finally, there's full MS Exchange email hosting (mostly).

The email hosting bit seems to be done via an Exhange killer product on the back side. HyerOffice is very careful to offer its' email hosting service as a 'low-cost alternative' to full Exchange hosting. However, the features that HyperOffice lists pretty much cover what an actual Exchange hoster would provide: custom domain management, IMAP or POP3, Outlook synchonization, shared Outlook calendars, shared Outlook contacts and even a Sharepoint-type feature. All that Outlook-compatible functionality at a below-Exchange price points to Exchange killer platforms like Scalix or Gordano. HyperOffice doesn't detail what it's using, but fortunately, our testing experiences with these products have been pretty darn good.

And that's just the email part. HyperOffice also has a slew of other services, including a pretty flexible collaboration tool kit. Shared document editing, versioning, storage--the usual trifecta. But this time combined with something that HyperOffice calls "interlinking"--an ability that sounds suspiciously like hyperlinking, but lets users tie together all documents in a project--even emails and notes.

Finally, HyperOffice also manages the full intranet load. Custom design tools, extranet integration, and customer portals. Everything's marketed with an 'alternative-to-Microsoft' approach, pitting these features against Sharepoint. Seeing some examples, it seems to work well enough, though I'm going to doubt it's as easy as Sharepoint.

Pricing for HyperOffice is actually one of its better features. Group size starts as small as 2 persons for a monthly charge of $18 all the way to 250 people for $1370/month. Team storage is assigned with these plans beginning at 200MB for 2 people up to 25GB for 250 people. But if your particular project requires more than the basic storage, HyperOFfice will sell you more space for $3.00 per additional 100MB.

Add it all up and it's a compelling portfolio of Web services for the SB set. Even better is the ability it has to let you grow from SB to MB and up without necessarily sacrificing the tool kit to which your employees have grown accustomed. All the MS Office integration on the client side is really just gravy in comparison.

Always wonder, tho, why this type of all-in-one-office-tool site doesn't also bundle voice services. Voicemail, fax services and even VoIP would seem a natural extension, no?

Posted by Oliver Rist on May 17, 2006 10:21 AM

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