EXTRANET NEWS * Week of 11 November 2002
Editors: Joel Orr and N'omi Orr
http://www.extranetnews.com

PROJECTVILLAGE: A NETWORK OF EXTRANETS

The more you talk with Mark Bostleman , CEO of ProjectVillage , the more you realize you are talking to an honest man. He is straightforward about his company's strengths--and its weaknesses. That's refreshing.

Bostleman , a software developer, grew up in a family of real-estate developers in Ohio . He recounted the origin of ProjectVillage in a session at Computers for Construction 2002: "In 1998, Kohl's bought a number of stores from the bankrupt Caldor chain. But the bankruptcy judge placed a condition on the sale: The 32 stores, in several different states, had to be opened in eight months. That meant dealing with many different building codes, suppliers, and more.

"We explored project-management systems, but found them all too expensive for the number of seats we needed. And our commercial client/server (non-Web) system couldn't scale to what we needed. So we spent about $50,000, and built WebPM --a Web-based logging system.

"It was great for us, and allowed us to complete the Kohl's project on time. But it actually made more work for all our partners.

"That's what made us decide to build ProjectVillage ."

I asked Mark what was special about ProjectVillage . "Our 'Enterprise Community' model lets different companies share information between ASP subscription accounts in a peer-to-peer organizational architecture," he said. "As far as I know, that's unique. Nobody else in the AEC industry does it."

What does that mean? "Simply that multiple organizations can share information with each other, while each organization controls access to the information in its private area. I see this as the third stage of Web-based project-management technology:

1996 - Project-specific Web sites, one project at a time.

1998 - Enterprise extranets: Applications shared by a single organization.

Today - Our 'Enterprise Community': One application scales to the whole supply chain."

Another uniqueness of ProjectVillage : Pricing. "In our pricing model," said Bostleman , "we only charge for actual concurrent users. In other words, we determine at the end of the billing period how many people were on the system at one time. And of course, if the customer is about to move from one price bracket to the next-higher one by having one more user log in, we have a provision for preventing that from happening accidentally."

The system has a well-thought-out security and permissions arrangement, and an easy-to-learn workflow management feature. It incorporates Informative Graphics' document viewer, which supports hundreds of document types, and Crystal Decisions' powerful report-writer.

Our take: The "network of extranets" and billing practices of ProjectVillage set it apart from other extranet vendors. I like the design of the user interface, and the fact that the company sprang out of the real estate and construction industry. It is small, but soundly structured, with an excellent product. One to watch.