Web workspace tool

Review Basics is a collaborative workspace for small teams and businesses. It runs right in your browser, and offers a fairly simple and straightforward way for others to share and leave feedback on photos, video files, and office documents. The interface runs entirely in Flash, so there are no special extensions to download, or programs that need to be installed on your computer. Just start up a workspace and go. Review Basics works with a variety of common office document standards like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF. It also can handle uploading an entire zipped folder, so if you get a zipped attachment in an e-mail, you can upload it straight to the service without having to unpack it and send files one at a time. ***

IBM announced on Tuesday a series of enhancements for WebSphere Portal Application Integrator, the company's set of tools for building corporate Web applications. WPAI is part of IBM's WebSphere family of products for creating corporate portals, internal Web sites that allow workers to view corporate data through a customized interface. The new tools are intended to make it easier for companies to create applications that display and consume data from back-end systems, such as human resources databases, said Tim Thatcher, IBM program director of portal and workspace products. WPAI will offer a greater selection of "portlets," applications for common portal tasks. Companies can use the portlets as-is or customize them. ***

SAP on Wednesday released the latest version of its portal software that helps companies integrate information from different business processes. Among the upgrades to SAP Enterprise Portal are new collaboration tools, expanded language capabilities and support for the Unix operating system. Portal software gathers data from business applications, databases, electronic documents, and the Web and aggregates it into one place so employees can find information quickly. Unix operability is a big step forward for SAP and will allow the portal software to work with server hardware built by vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems. SAP's portal system has historically catered to businesses running Microsoft Windows. Greg Crider, director of product marketing for SAP Enterprise Portal said the German company is attempting to discourage the perception that ***