ShareMethods Announces Online Calendar and Meeting Apps for ShareOffice

September 17, 2007; 06:53 AM

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) September 7, 2007 -- ShareMethods (http://www.sharemethods.com) announced the availability of additional on-demand services to its online office suite ShareOffice™. Building upon the foundation of ShareOffice with online word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation apps from iNetWord, EditGrid, and Preezo, ShareOffice has been extended to include an online calendar and real-time meeting capabilities. This rapid expansion of ShareOffice capability has been made possible through the use of Open Simple Ajax Mashup (OpenSAM - www.opensam.org), a standard for interoperability across Office 2.0 applications. The online calendar and real-time collaboration services have been developed respectively by new members of the OpenSAM ecosystem - Jotlet (www.jotlet.net) and Persony (www.persony.com).

The features and benefits enabled with these product advances include the following:

- ShareOffice Online Calendar: ShareOffice now allows users to launch an online calendar with unique document collaboration features. Users can attach documents, images, and even entire folders to any calendar event or task. These appointments can then easily be shared with co-workers, and documents can be attached, viewed, downloaded, or collaboratively edited directly from the calendar.

- ShareOffice Real Time Meetings: ShareOffice now allows users to launch real time meetings on the Mac or the PC using a Flash based conferencing application. Meeting participants can share, control, and annotate their online media files in an interactive live meeting with other participants; Persony also introduces an innovative feature to allow members to upload their Flash video and MP3 audio files to their own online library with their new release.

A user scenario for the new online calendar and real time meeting features would be to streamline the work required to prepare for and run an upcoming meeting with a distributed team. The ShareOffice calendar could include not only the information about the meeting but also all of the key documents, images, and folders needed for that meeting. Users can then view all key documents directly prior to the meeting, or collaboratively edit the documents in real time during the meeting. In addition, the real time meeting capability could be used to launch a meeting with screen sharing, shared whiteboards, annotation, chat, joint viewing of media, web page examples, etc.

"We're in the business of customizing our online calendar application for individual businesses," says Adam Wulf, Jotlet's Co-founder, "and our integration with ShareOffice has let us quickly and easily expand our offering to our users. We now provide our customers more options, more applications, and more integration points than anyone else in the market".

"Persony's mission is to make web and video conferencing as easy-to-use and affordable as email," said Eric Chen, CEO of Persony, Inc. "ShareOffice and OpenSAM help to bring us one step closer to realizing our mission. Business users now can start a real-time collaboration session seamlessly without the need to log in to another service."

ShareOffice is the world's first online office built upon open standards using OpenSAM. Leading Office 2.0 companies have joined OpenSAM including EchoSign, EditGrid, iNetOffice, Joyent, Preezo, ShareMethods, Caspio, Sheetster, SmartSheet, Huddle, Jotlet, and Persony. The addition of new apps to ShareOffice from Jotlet and Persony demonstrate the acceleration of momentum for OpenSAM with its ability to transform the on-demand marketplace so that applications work together more seamlessly for end-users and the market is expanded for application service providers. The new features in ShareOffice are initially available in ShareOffice for AppExchange and will soon also be available in the standalone version of ShareOffice.

ShareMethods CEO Eric Hoffert will be announcing and demonstrating these product advances at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. This includes making announcements at the Launch Pad event on Wednesday September 6 at 12:30 pm; participating in a keynote session called "The New Platforms" along with Yahoo!, salesforce.com, WebEx, Zoho, and Rearden Commerce on Friday September 7 at 9 am (moderated by Rafe Needleman of CNET Networks); and moderating a panel session on Open Simple Ajax Mashup (OpenSAM) also on Friday at 2:15 pm, which will include OpenSAM members EditGrid, iNetWord, Huddle, Persony, and Jotlet. Learn more about the Office 2.0 Conference at www.o2con.com.

About Jotlet:
Jotlet provides an extremely easy to use and robust online calendar to help companies and users manage, share, and publish their schedule. A free version is available for individuals, and for companies Jotlet provides customized event and task entry forms, advanced reporting tools, fully configurable user permissions and security, and an administrator's panel to fine-tune Jotlet features per user or user group. The entirety of Jotlet's interface can be full customized to fit a specific company's business process and workflow. Full website integration and corporate branding is also available to compliment a company's current online offering. Visit www.jotlet.net.

About Persony, Inc.:
Persony's solution already enables many service providers to provide fully branded, feature-rich, and easy-to-use Web collaboration services at very affordable pricing. Persony's patent-pending "smart-client" technology puts the intelligence of a collaborative application on the client side and uses standard Web servers to connect remote users. By leveraging the millions of Web servers and service providers in existence, Persony's solution can be deployed anywhere and at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. The smart-client approach is a disruptive technology that allows individuals and small businesses to afford applications that were once only available to larger corporations. For more information about the company, visit www.persony.com.

About ShareMethods:
With ShareMethods, sales and marketing teams can store, manage, and share documents easily and securely, collaborating with extended selling networks to close more business, providing a cost-effective alternative to developing and supporting a sales and marketing intranet or extranet. The "Sales and Marketing Portal in a Box" approach can cost less than one tenth of the price of traditional enterprise software. ShareMethods provides on-demand services to more than 200 companies on a global basis with users in 32 countries and customers including BusinessWeek, Agile Software, CNET Channel, NMS Communications, HID Global, Airspan Networks, etc. ShareMethods on-demand services include ShareNow for AppExchange, ShareOffice for AppExchange, ShareDrive, and ShareMethods. ShareMethods founding team includes industry veterans from Apple Computer, AT&T Bell Labs, NASA, etc. Visit www.sharemethods.com or call 1-877-SHARENOW.