The bMighty Blog -- Apple

According to the folks at CatalystWeb, which makes a Web-based business productivity and collaboration suite, small businesses need affordable software that’s geared for their needs – and not busting with unneeded features designed for huge enterprises. The company is trying to address that need with a new Mac version of its CatalystOffice software.

“Most Web-based productivity software is not fully compatible with Mac, and most Mac applications are not enterprise grade. CatalystOffice now can offer Mac users full functionality of Microsoft Exchange-like software, along with document collaboration and IM, in a Web-based form,” says Mallory Dash, a company spokesman.

CatalystWeb’s CEO, Bob Mathew, points out that “most business-class applications are not supported by both PC and Mac operating systems. CatalystOffice users don’t have to lug around a PC if they have a Mac at home. When we say ‘access your office anywhere,’ we mean it no matter what operating system you use.”

Unlike a lot of Web-based applications, CatalystOffice was developed to use the cross-platform Firefox browser – not the Windows-specific Internet Explorer.

CatalystOffice isn’t free, but it’s not expensive, either – and unlike with desktop software like Microsoft Office, you don’t have to buy software per person. Instead, you pay based on how much storage your entire company uses on the CatalystWeb servers. Pricing starts at $25 a month for 10GB of storage and scale up to $125 a month for 100GB. It doesn’t matter if that’s one employee or a hundred: you pay for how much you use, not how many people use it.

What do you get for that price? Not only Web-based storage and backup, but e-mail, document management, calendar, contact management and secure instant messaging. It looks like a great solution, especially for companies were workers or contractor can be in multiple locations, and where collaboration and shared storage is a big pain to set up and administer.

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