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Central Desktop launched a couple years ago, and since then the small company from Pasadena, California, has grown into a respected and much-discussed online collaboration system.

Central Desktop is a browser-based instant workplace or intranet that runs on Windows and Macintosh PCs. With it, admins can select templates (including one for intranets and departmental sites) to create instant online shared spaces. End users can then create online calendars, contact databases, task lists, project milestones, and much more. The product is built on a wiki engine, and allows people to collaborate on pages as a traditional wiki does.

I recently spoke with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, about how his hosted-intranet company works, how his deal with Salesfore.com is going (or not going), some of the challenges facing software-as-a-service companies, what he thinks about social networking, and other topics.

Q. Is Central Desktop an entirely hosted product?

We're a pure play software service. We host all of our solutions online. Everyone subscribes to our services. And at this time we don't supply it as an appliance or as a download.

Q. Tell me about some of the features you've rolled out recently and how they're doing.

People are always using Central Desktop as an intranet. That was one of the uses that people had. But we sort of made it a little bit more turnkey (define). We made it so that people could easily create an intranet that was constantly being updated sort of in real time. Imagine, Tom, that you're part of multiple workspaces. You're managing multiple projects. And there at your company you have different team members that are working on this project. You also have one … location that you're using as an intranet, where your main information is stored: documents, calendar, files.

But what you also want to have in that intranet is … from that one screen, you want to be able to see what's happening in your other projects. You want that intranet to be living and for it to be updating with real information. So what we did is we took that whole concept and said, at (your intranet site) you will have automated feeds and updates that automatically bubble up. So that intranet always shows the latest status of work that's happening in all these other workspaces. It makes it much more living and real. Instead of most intranets which are sort of …

Q. Static. That was one of the complaints of the old-fashioned intranets, that they were just this static page, and boring as heck.

Yeah, exactly. But if you can go there and see some active discussions happening here, here's the latest bookmarks that have been added, here's some new files that have been uploaded, and here's the status of my other projects, it takes on a new element of being alive. And it's been received very well.

Q. Are you seeing it update live on the page, or do you have to click down to figure out what's going on?

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On the page, imagine you have three panes you're looking at … (in one pane) a list of all the latest documents that have been uploaded across the different workspaces, here's a list on the right-hand side of all the latest bookmarks, and then in the center you have this (list of) updating recent activities. It aggregates all the recent activity that's been happening across all the projects that you're part of. What's so unique about it is, wherever you go and you log into that intranet, you're only seeing what Tom Dunlap is supposed to see. … You're only seeing the items that bubble up that are relevant to you.

Q. You personalize it and set security settings and that kind of stuff?

That's right. And it's pretty turnkey. Now, when people first sign up and say, let's "turn on the intranet," well, there's not a lot going on whenever you first start. … So really that's why we reserved it for our company subscribers, because they're the ones that tend to have multiple projects, a lot more people involved, therefore it's more relevant.

Q. When it's turnkey, are customers controlling the APIs, or do they just send requests to you? I'm curious how that works.

What actually happens is, you would create your Central Desktop account, and once you create it for Jupitermedia (for instance), then you would say OK, I'm going create a workspace for project A, a workspace for project B, and then I'm also going to create a workspace that I'm going to designate as the intranet. And that intranet is now part of that whole account. So when you log in, you either land at the dashboard … or you land at the intranet.

So there's really no configuration on your side, like on Jupitermedia's side if you want to deploy it, unless -- and we've added this actually, this was kind of a silent rollout that we did -- we had some large companies that kept saying, hey, I've got 2,000 users, or I've got 1,000 users, I want to give them authenticated access to this intranet. … So we created an API, just as you suggested there, that speaks between your local network and Central Desktop, and it's authenticated through the API. And now the administrators can automatically add and move uses, set permissions through the API. It's really something that our enterprise clients are really starting to want.

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