Today's increasingly virtual businesses often find themselves awash in a torrent of communications, struggling for a way to organize material generated by geographically diverse teams as well as external contributors such as suppliers and consultants. A decade ago, heavyweight "groupware" packages tried to solve this problem, but these days, tools such as blogs and wikis are providing a more familiar, less unwieldy, and more compelling model for team collaboration.

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Near-Time Premium is one of this new generation of Web-based solutions that aim to facilitate communication and collaboration—and even publishing—by means of a hosted service that doesn't require you to install or manage software and servers at your company's location. Near-Time's spaces provide access-controlled areas where users can create wiki-style informational pages, post blog-style news articles, manage events and tasks, and maintain a depository of files—offering, in effect, a centralized, Web-accessible repository where a team can share its knowledge both internally and with the world at large. The question is, how well does it work?