I'm searching for a secure and easy way for business partners to collaboratively edit and exchange documents, share calendars, create schedules, and assign tasks. I speculate that the ideal collaboration environment or work-flow would actually involve several technologies and services. My co-workers and I have tried a variety of things from Google Apps to Wiki's, but nothing feels very fluid or complete.
I suppose defining what we need and our constraints is probably in order:
- collaboratively edit basic text documents and spreadsheets
- exchange documents like flow-charts, graphs, and files generated by our other desktop applications, but not source code
- assign tasks to each other and ourselves and track the history of those tasks
- easily see when relevant documents have been modified since last viewing and ability to easily push notifications to relevant workers (a clean front page that shows updates would probably suffice)
- provide limited access to contract workers and guests users
- if a remote user system is compromised (keystroke logger or other spyware) we don't want the criminal to be able to gain access to all business documents (processes, trade-secrets, customer lists, etc.) simply because they gained access to a single Google account (or whatever web service)
- Cannot be a difficult to administer VPN infrastructure
- Cannot cost more than $100 per month (yeah, money is tight)
- Needs to support up to 25 users
- We can host our own web applications, but it must be low maintenance solution
