I’ve been pretty quiet about the project I’m currently working on, but that’s going to change now that we’re heading towards the beginning of our private beta program.

I’m currently working with a group of wickedly smart people to build a new hosted (yes, SaaS-based) collaborative decision making platform: DecisionSpaces.

What does DecisionSpaces do?  There are lots of collaborative tools available today to help groups of people share documents and collaboratively edit pages (like Microsoft SharePoint or Wikis), but most of them offer up only a blank slate.  The space is generic, facilitating any kind of collaborative effort: working on a spreadsheet, writing copy for a new marketing campaign, developing product design documentation, etc.  But these tools are merely general purpose collaboration containers, and they don’t necessarily help in the decision making process itself.

In fact, many people revert to email when it comes to making a collective decision.  For example: imagine a group of folks trying to determine where to hold their next convention.  Should they use the old reliable location that they’ve used the last four years, or should they try something new?  Typically this kind of exercise would start over email, and quickly spiral out of control: people would be added or dropped from CC, documents would be circulated, and a decision might be made without everyone knowing exactly what had been decided.  DecisionSpaces provides a place for that kind of decision making, and will allow the group’s work to be captured and easily reviewed so that everyone in the project stays in the loop, all without clogging up your email inbox.

So why SaaS-based?  Well, first: it’s nice to be able to invite others to your decision, akin to being able to invite anyone to an instant web conference.  Having an internally hosted solution often means getting the right ports open on the firewall, having the right bandwidth, etc.  By offering it through SaaS, we’re making it easier to bring in anyone from anywhere.  Secondly, SaaS offers customers greater flexibility with pricing, allowing people to effectively pay for what they are using instead of buying software that ultimately never gets installed (known as "shelfware").  Finally, we personally believe in SaaS as the best way to deliver software to our customers.  It’s not just a business model; it’s a way to keep our software on the cutting edge without having our customers go through any kind of painful patching or update process to stay current.

Why register for the beta? The Private Beta program will begin in the first half of 2009, and participants will be chosen from the folks that register between now and the end of February 2009.  The benefits of registering include:

• Being able to use the DecisionSpaces Beta for free
• Being able to help drive the development of the product to fit your real-world decision making needs
• Getting access to special pricing once we exit beta
• Being able to sit on conference calls and web demonstrations with me and other talented and interesting individuals from the DecisionSpaces team

If any of that sounds interesting to you, please visit DecisionSpaces and register for the private beta today.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Enterprise Web, Knowledge Management, SaaS, Social Computing, Wikis