DocSpace Adds Web Collaboration to Product Suite.

Canadian web software developer The DocSpace Company Inc has added a module enabling its customers' employees to collaborate over the internet to its bundled suite of products, which bears the same name as the company itself. DocSpace Manager joins two earlier modules, web courier Express and Drive, which the Toronto-based company describes as a secure virtual hard drive. Express enables large files to be send efficiently across the web and is favored by clients such as ad agencies, which need to transfer graphics-rich proofs electronically. Drive makes it possible to store, organize and access files from on the web and access them remotely. None of the modules requires client software.

The entire DocSpace bundle is sold, together with a control console for centralized management called Admin, as a subscription-based service, said Sandra Wear, managing director of the company's UK subsidiary.

DocSpace currently carries out about 50% its sales directly, but it is the other half that it is seeking to promote by the development of its partner relationships. Its main partners are internet service providers seeking to develop an application service provision business. These include Microsoft's MSN and legal portal Lawinfo, though the company is also developing other types of partners, such as banks that want to offer the services to their business customers.

The DocSpace service is paid by user, by month, and by amount of storage required for each user, though major corporate clients can buy, say, a year's subscription, with unlimited access, Wear explained. Even so, the software itself remains resident on DocSpace's own hosts, with the subscribers accessing it via their browser. For the future, said Wear, the company plans greater integration of the modules. It plans to add a facility that will enable end users to click straight from one module to the other, rather than opening them separately.

DocSpace came into existence in 1997, the result of a management buy-out of a division of a leading Canadian ISP. The company plans to move its HQ from Toronto to Menlo Park, California in the next few months.