Central<$> Desktop is one of the growing number of online business collaboration tools competing for your workspace.Such software allows project teams to work on the same documents at the same time or over a period of time — where ever they are located. Last week I and other journalists got a trial preview of the company’s latest addition — a real-time spreadsheet application. The addition was announced yesterday.

As any multinational business in Bermuda knows, getting project teams together in one place is costly although it must be done sometimes. When they are not together documents get worked on and tracking which one is current and which is not, can lead to unnecessary confusion and even mistakes.

From my desk in Montpellier, France I was able to work on a cost estimate spreadsheet at the same time as Central Desktop’s president Isaac Garcia in the US. Thus we could adjust different variables to see the outcomes, all the changes from my end or his end immediately viewable by both of us. The spreadsheet function is just part of the expanding functionality Central Desktop is adding to stay ahead of this growing market.

Other companies in this arena, also offer a mix of various services including e-mail, document and project management, shared calendaring and contacts.

The cost is usually on a per month basis depending on what services a company wants to use and on the number of collaborations and projects involved.

Some of the companies offering such services include Basecamp, Jotspot (a Google offering), WebOffice, SharePoint, and HyperOffice. Central Desktop, which began life as a start-up in May 2005, now has 25,000 users, with 30 per cent of them paying customers. The rest use the service for free, while the company builds its service.

“Online collaboration is nothing new,” Mr. Garcia told me.

“What we are offering is a new way in how we deploy these tools.”

The new Central Desktop’s EditGrid offering allows users to create, edit and share the online spreadsheets in real-time. Team members can create about 30 types of charts using the spreadsheet functions. They can automatically fetch and store stock quotes, foreign currency rates and website data into a spreadsheet, which also has about 500 formulas and functions.

The spreadsheets can also be imported and exported to and from Microsoft Excel on a user’s computer. Data can be exported to XLS, XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org, HTML, PDF and CSV file formats.

The online spreadsheets are kept in a secure, password protected workspace in which a project administrator can grant user permissions to control access. Users can be given permission to read, edit, add, or delete entries, depending on their status in the project.

What is key to such online collaboration is the audit trail created for each document change. These include an ability to revert to previous version of a spreadsheet. Project leaders can also see who has made what changes and when.

Central Desktop’s other tools includes collaborative document editing, Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. Check it out at www.centraldesktop.com.