Attend a staff meeting while you’re on the road, manage a project with co-workers at remote locations, or make a sales call to prospects across the globe: Web-based collaborative software lets you spend time and share tasks with colleagues, prospects, customers and suppliers no matter where you—or they—are.

Two popular options, Citrix GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com) and Webex MeetMeNow (www.webex.com), let you try before you buy and offer a $39 monthly fee for an unlimited number of meetings when you sign up for a year. As with many of today’s crop of collaborative tools, both allow you to invite up to 10 participants, share files from any application, chat, annotate documents and record content, while promising reliable security. Webex also offers a pay-per-use solution for a low per-minute, per-user fee. Options like ProjectSpaces by Forum One Communications (www.forumone.com/section/services/projectspaces) focus on real-time project collaboration rather than on meetings and are priced according to number of active projects.

One of the newest entries into the field is Microsoft’s Windows Collaboration, which uses peer-to-peer technology to allow users to project their desktops to those of their colleagues. Windows Collaboration is part of Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, the replacement for Windows XP.

With online collaboration becoming as essential to internal and eternal business operations as e-mail and voice communication, the question is no longer whether your business needs the software, but rather which of the many available products is best for your business needs. For capsule information on a host of options and to request information from multiple vendors, visit www.capterra.com/web-collaboration-solutions.