Intranets.com Adds Web Conferencing To Service

The Woburn, Mass., company offers the collaboration capabilities, including e-mail as a monthly subscription. The Web conference capability, which the company said competes favorably with WebEx and Microsoft's Live Meeting, costs an additional $99.95 per month for 25 concurrent users. The audio conferencing, is 12 cents per minute with no monthly fee. The Web conference and audio capabilities are licensed from Netspoke, Woburn, Mass.

The base collaboration software starts at $49.95 per month for five users. For the full price list see Intranets' Web site.

Twenty percent of the company's business now goes through partners, but as it launches vertical versions of the offering it hopes to use more partners to attack the consulting, financial services and real estate markets, company executives said. It is also concentrating on small to midsize businesses that might prefer a predictable fixed-cost solution vs. hosting its own mail and conferencing services.

Mary Motz, principal of ProVirtual Solutions and VA-Nets, a Perkiomenville, Pa., solution provider, has resold the service for a year and a half and is happy with the partnership.

"Intranets.com has taken great pains to keep its product both current and stable. ... They have impressed me with their constant upgrades and attention to reliability. I rarely get a call from a client with a problem or complaint-- and that is saying something in the tech world. The upcoming upgrade that will include Web conferencing is a great example of that." she noted.

Realtime conferencing is becoming more of a top-of-mind concern for companies trying to keep travel costs down, some observers said. Microsoft is working on upgrades to its Live Communications Server (LCS) which will meld its currently distinct LCS and Live Meeting capabilities. and IBM's Lotus Software is also a big player in conferencing, especially among larger accounts.