Webex office

WebEx on Monday released a hosted email product aimed at small businesses to complement its WebEx WebOffice suite. Called WebEx Mail, the offering is designed to be a more professional and reliable alternative to ISP mail and simpler than Microsoft's Exchange, according to company executives. Features include the ability to set up group emails through a central administration program and search emails as well as attachments. It can be accessed via a browser, mobile client or Microsoft's Outlook. The mail service is integrated with the other components of WebEx WebOffice, which include Web conferencing, group calendar, and basic document management. Rather than rely on ads to fund the service, WebEx will charge $5.95 per mailbox per month, the company said. ***

GigaOm blogger Om Malik is asking the people on his panel, "Office 2.0: Where Are We?" where they are on the Office 2.0 scale. Are they old-school Office 1.0 (PC-based apps) users, or all-online, Office 2.0 gurus? Ismael Ghalimi, the conference organizer, says he's at Office 1.95. The Web let him down when he had to print conference badges. Karen Leavitt, of Webex, who says her company is the 800-pound gorilla of Web 2.0, says she's at Office 1.73. Mark Suster, CEO of Koral, a content collaboration company. He's at 1.75. And he points out that people around the world work very differently. The way we do things in California is very different from workers in Europe, Asia, or Wisconsin. That's a really important point. Rajen Sheth, of Google, is trying to bring Google technologies to business. He says he's at 1.9999. ***

The days of companies using unsecure consumer technology for instant messaging are numbered, according to AOL and online conferencing company WebEx. AIM Pro Business Edition (PBE), launched on Thursday, is an IM service aimed at business users who need tighter security and management than traditionally available in consumer products. Corporate IM systems do exist. However, the makers of AIM PBE said that, unlike other products, their service does not require a dedicated local server, but is hosted online. That makes it more flexible to manage and deploy, they claimed. "There is a reason enterprise-grade IM (EIM) software hasn't taken off: Companies simply don't want to buy and maintain complex IM servers. ***