HOLLAND, Ohio Nov. 3, 2000-ProjectVillage Friday announced the first version release of its web-based collaboration and project management application for the AEC industry.

Available as either a subscription service in an ASP model or as a self-hosted product, ProjectVillage provides organizations with 14
modules of AEC project management functionality and documentation including RFIs, Submittals, Meeting Minutes, Subcontracts, Prime Contracts, Punch Lists, Drawings, Photos and File Storage to name a few.

Amidst a crowd of collaborative extranet vendors in the AEC space, ProjectVillage introduces several revolutionary technologies that are unique in the industry.

Most notably, the application is built on the patent pending Enterprise Community architecture in which any organization, having its own account in the application, can share project information with other organizations that have their own accounts. Using this model, each organization can have and control its own information on each project it works on, while still collaborating with other organizations from within its own account.

The conventional extranet model requires a one-to-one relationship between all of the information on a project and an account within the application. As a result, one organization (the account holder, or host) owns and controls all of the information and process while users from other organizations login via a username and password granted by the host and see and use the information at the whim of the host.

"Obviously, this is not how organizations work together in the real world, and we don't think, ultimately, it's the way they'll want to work together online," said Mark Bostleman, founder and president of ProjectVillage. "The Enterprise Community model represents a huge value proposition on several levels. As the adoption of online business increases, everyone in the supply chain is going to want to have their organization online and, at that point, the host-guest paradigm isn't going to cut it."

Another significant feature introduced with this version of ProjectVillage is workflow design. Items from most of the modules in the application are routed from one user to the next via a workflow path. An organization can create any number of paths and, within them, create and modify basic process components such as steps, actions, permissions, roles and occupants.

Once created and customized for the path, the objects are connected together within the workflow design module, allowing an organization to create any imaginable process network. With this functionality, an organization can quickly create, modify and enforce process without expensive and time consuming "customization" by the software vendor. And because permissions are a workflow design component, security becomes dynamic and is enforced in the context of business process rather than as statically granted rights. Combined with the Enterprise Community model, workflow design becomes very powerful in that processes can cross organizational account boundaries.

ProjectVillage was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Holland, Ohio. For more information, visit www.projectvillage.com