The PBworks dashboard allows users to track project progress and contributions
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Hosted collaboration solutions provider PBworks (www.pbworks.com) has launched of PBworks Agency Edition, a hosted suite of customized collaboration tools for creative professionals at advertising, PR, marketing, and design agencies.
According to PBworks’ recent announcement, PBworks Agency Edition offers shared online workspaces that allow employees to collaborate internally, and with customers and partners, throughout the entire project lifecycle.
“It’s an agency edition that tries to bring these concepts of online colaboration to Madison Ave.,” PBworks marketing vice president Chris Yeh said in a phone interview.
Prior to the Tuesday release of PBworks Agency Edition, the company had launched software-as-a-service-based collaboration solutions for various verticals including education and law. Yeh says the advertising sector has been keen to adopt online collaboration solutions.
“What we discovered this year,” says Yeh, “is that the advertising agencies, marketing agencies, PR agencies… really have turned out to be very good customers of ours and have some relatively homogeneous needs within their segment that we could serve with a differentiated product, so that’s why we created an agency edition.”
While existing solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint offer collaboration capabilities, PBworks Agency Edition offers advertisers an out-of-the-box solution that requires little to no customization to fit their needs. It provides a persistent, shared environment that companies can use with their customer throughout the relationship lifecycle, from prospecting and sales to ongoing account management and support, enabling businesses to do business more efficiently, and build stronger relationships with customers.
“We really are a rapid and agile development shop,” he says. “We’re 100-percent SaaS and that means that we can change and iterate a lot faster. One of the advantages we find over solutions that are competitive sometimes such as Microsoft Sharepoint, is that with Sharepoint, you’ve got a three or four year product cycle – with us you’ve got a three or four day product cycle.”
According to Yeh, one of the reasons for an agency edition is that they’re very collaborative by nature, given that doing something like creating a Super Bowl commercial involves numerous people including designers, copywriters, technologists, brand managers, and more. He says traditionally, these businesses would rely on a “traffic department” that would be responsible for “nagging these people” until the job is done. By facilitating easy and transparent communication, PBworks Agency Edition essentially eliminates the role of the traffic department, and at least some of the nagging.
Another reason for the agency edition is that advertising, over the past few years, has become increasingly complex, and organizations are often partnering with specialists to deal with multiple chanels. “Media fragmentation is driving a much greater degree of multi-channel campaigns, which then, in turn, drive a much greater degree of cross-agency collaboration. It’s pretty rare that one agency will have all the capabilities to do all of those things.”
To meet this need, PBworks Agency Edition lets individuals from inside and outside the organization collaborate.
“We actually have priced the product in response to this,” Yeh says. “For an agency, the pricing is based on the number of employees they have using the system – on a per-seat model. but we do not charge them for the collaborators – the outside agencies, the customers, the clients, and so on and so forth, they bring in – because their level of involvement with the platform is much less, and you can’t expect to pay the same amount… Say you’re an agency, you can bring in a partner agency and give them a guest account to use on the campaign you’re working on together, and those guest accounts don’t cost you a thing.”
He also noted that by offering PBworks to collaborators, it gives organizations a demonstration of the product. “From a marketing perspective, hey, what better way to expose people to your product than to have them use it to get something done?”
While PBworks Agency Edition is available immediately from the company starting at $30 per user per month, the company welcomes reseller arrangements and partnerships.
“PBworks has an open API and you can build on top of it and sell whatever else you want,” says Yeh. This means that, while PBworks Agency Edition solves many of the collaboration problems of ad organizations, partners can use PBworks as the basis for their own solutions that address the particular challenges of another field.
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