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In case you hadn't heard, social networking features are hitting the intranet in a big way, and the latest company to bring collaborative features to business is PBworks.

With the social networking update that PBworks just unveiled, customers of the company's project and legal editions gain three important collaboration features. All are designed to take Web 2.0 technologies and put them to work.

Profiles

People who use sites like Facebook and Linked In spend a lot of time crafting their profiles, since that's how the other users know what you're like and what you've been doing. PBworks lets you do the same at work by creating a profile that emphasizes your skill set. Your company's administrator controls which input fields are in the profile, creating a custom template for your company. You then build a profile that lets others in the organization know where you've worked and what skills you have. It lets project leaders quickly see who would benefit their teams.

Microblogging

Twitter is currently the biggest name in social networking, and PBworks uses the same microblogging idea in this update. The company first spoke to customers and asked them what they use Twitter for. It found that Twitter was good for unstructured talk, for brainstorming that might lead to a new product idea. With that in mind, PBworks's microblogging tool is designed to help customers solicit ideas from coworkers. Even better, it integrates with other tools in the suite, including documents, files, and applications. That means users can view a message and see what the poster was doing when they wrote it. It gives more context that seeing only the message.

E-mail Integration

Don't think of e-mail as social networking? It's the biggest social networking tool around, and the messaging in PBworks gets a lot more social with this update. Users can now take a long, threaded discussion and instantly convert it into a wiki page. If you and several coworkers are emailing project ideas back and forth, you can create a wiki pages out of the discussion. With a wiki page, it becomes easier to see what's been talked about, to add files and other attachments, and to make new entries. To create a wiki page, a user only needs to forward the e-mail thread to a special address. The page is then created automatically, and the coworkers can continue their discussion on the wiki page.

The project management edition of PBworks lets managers assign milestones and tasks, and makes it easy for them to track projects. Users can assign comments or links to tasks, and the tasks contain all the relevant information for a project. The legal edition of PBworks is similar, but contains two extra components: encryption on disk, providing 256-bit encryption to stored data, and an audit log that records every single action on the network.

PBworks is a hosted solution that goes for $20 per user per month for the project management edition, and $50 per user per month for the legal edition. Pro bono practices are eligible for a free copy. For more information, check out the PBworks site.

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