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HyperOffice, the maker of an excellent hosted online collaboration suite by the same name, has just improved the suite's document management features, making them both easier and far more useful.

We covered HyperOffice in August of 2004, and found that it provides a virtual workspace with e-mail, calendaring, a central address book, and more, for a price that even small offices can afford. The improvements to the document management system make it much easier for team members to collaborate and keep track of multiple document versions.

The suite's previous document management tools asked users to go through too many steps when removing or returning a document, but the new system makes the operation seamless. For starters, the online storage area now mounts to your desk like a local drive, with its own drive letter, so that you can drag items in or out just like you would local documents. There's little lag time, especially for documents with small file size, so you won't need to wait for the document to download. The old version created a new file name for each uploaded document, so that your version wouldn't overwrite someone else's. The new system dispenses with multiple folders, but keeps track of multiple versions in case you want to roll back changes.

If you're already a HyperOffice user, you'll have to look closely to see interface changes related to the new tools. The developers have kept the document management area largely the same, and have only added a button labeled "Details" to each document listing. Click it and you'll get the new document management options, but only for that document. Administrators can set options for a group of documents, but most users will have to set each document individually.

One important new feature is the ability to lock a document while you're working on it. This doesn't happen automatically when you check a document out, so that you won't inconvenience your co-workers whenever you take something to print it. Instead, you need to click the Details button for that page and then click a radio button to lock it. When you do, your co-workers will see a padlock icon by that item. They'll also be able to tell that you checked it out, in case they need to ask you to return it.

That same Details button also reveals the new comment ability. You can leave a comment on a file for other users to see, such as directions about what should be added or removed.

HyperOffice keeps track of older versions of a document, in case you ever need to roll back to a previous copy, and even gives you control over how many versions to keep. You can specify the number of copies to always save, or input a time frame and tell it to delete anything that's older than that date. A virtual recycle bin lets you recover trashed files.

Pricing for HyperOffice works by the size of your group. At the starter level a two-person group pays only $14.95 per month and gets 200MB of storage, while a 100 person group pays $499 monthly for 10GB of storage. Other group sizes are available, as is extra storage.

The details page for each document lets you lock it, make comments, and view the version history.