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When Internet conferencing vendor WebEx announced it was buying Intranets.com back in August, WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar said the acquisition would allow WebEx to "go deep" and "go wide" with its offerings. Formerly a vendor of an enterprise Web conferencing product, WebEx would soon appeal to small businesses and individual professionals, he said. That day has arrived.

Starting today, Intranets.com will be re-branded as WebExOne, the small business and knowledge worker arm of WebEx, and it has a host of new products to offer. The changes run deep. Even the M&Ms at the Intranets.com office in Massachusetts are now in the familiar WebEx blue and green colors, and the sign on the building will soon be changed. "We are drinking the Kool-Aid here," Karen Leavitt, VP of marketing, told Intranet Journal.

The hosted intranet offering with more than 9,000 customers, formerly known as the Intranets.com suite, will now be called WebOffice. It will be available in a Workgroup Edition for small businesses and a Personal Edition for individual professionals.

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The applications inside WebOffice remain largely the same as they were under the Intranets.com brand. Intranets are still customizable, including your choice of password policies, logos, and colors. The Document Manager still allows the use of WebDAV to drag and drop documents into the repository. The Database application remains friendly to non-technical users by hiding the SQL from them.

The first sign of change comes in the Calendaring application. Intranets.com added group scheduling last year, but the groups were always restricted to users within the intranet. Users can now choose to invite people to meetings from their contacts list or from outside entirely by using an e-mail address.

Thanks to the WebEx merger, however, meetings arranged with the group scheduler can now be easily turned into online conferences. "Now we have smooth, seamless integration of Web meetings with asynchronous features," Leavitt said.

WebOffice group scheduling allows you to easily create an online meeting using WebEx.

There is an additional fee to enable the Web meetings within the WebOffice product, but it will be included in the free 30-day trial that potential customers can get without leaving a credit card number. Single users that use WebOffice Personal get a less-expensive suite with fewer features and storage, but it does include one seat for Web meetings for a fee.

WebOffice Workgroup pricing starts at $59.95 for five users. Web Meetings are an additional $49.95 per month per host (five host minimum), and can include up to five participants per meeting. Web Meeting upgrades are also available for businesses that need more users or enhanced functionality.

WebOffice Personal is offered at one flat rate of $49.95 per month. Web Meeting upgrades are available.

New Standalone Products

WebExOne is also unveiling a standalone product called MeetMeNow, a downloadable client that resides in a user's system tray and allows them to instantly start an online meeting. Invitations to the meeting can be sent by e-mail, by sending a link, or using any common instant messaging application. MeetMeNow even installs a Meeting Invitation tab on the IM client.

MeetMeNow joins the WebEx offerings as the low-end price option for allowing users to start meetings. At the top of the list is Meeting Center Pro, the flagship online conferencing offering for enterprises that was beyond the price point of most small businesses. Now it's followed by WebOffice Workgroup, WebOffice Personal Edition, and MeetMeNow.

"We're really breaking through a price point here," Leavitt said. MeetMeNow runs $49 per month. Customers who commit to an annual plan can save $10 per month.

All of the WebExOne offerings use the MediaTone network that WebEx uses for its enterprise products. "It's the backend infrastructure WebEx has spent millions of dollars building out for enterprise customers, now available for small business," Leavitt said.

The final new product unveiled for WebExOne is PCNow, which was available as a preview edition from WebEx called MyWebExPC before the Intranets.com acquisition. PCNow allows remote management of PCs using only a lightweight thin client installed on the desktop of the host machine.

Leavitt said PCNow can be used by help desks or customer service reps to take control of a user's PC to fix a problem or perform a demonstration, as well as send print jobs to remote or local printers. It's available for $14.95 per month for each PC, but there's a $9.95 introductory price.

MeetMeNow is a downloadable client that resides in a user's system tray and allows them to instantly start an online meeting.

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