Collaborate in a Shared Online Workspace with Collaber

Thanks to the various online collaboration tools out there, you have one less way to contract Swine Flu. Throwing its hat into the let's-avoid-touching-or-meeting-face-to-face ring: Collaber, a shared collaboration space that tries to replace a bevy of communication and sharing services, including file sharing, chat, calendars, and more.

To use Collaber, you create a workspace and invite some people to share it with you. Each workspace comes with a wide range of tools, like an address book, calendar, chat client, and file sharing. That's not all -- you can conduct polls and even build interactive wikis. And yYou can control roles and permissions for each participant, as well.

There are a variety of pricing plans, from free -- you get a single workspace and 500MB of file storage -- to $30/year (unlimited workspaces and 4GB of storage) to an enterprise plan that charges $3/user per month.

Collaber is an interesting offering. The sheer quantity of services it offers, and the platforms it supports (you can install it on PC, Mac, or Linux, or just stick with a Web version) makes up for the ugly, old-school, stickified visuals and occasional rough edges.

On the other hand, I suspect Collaber tries to do a little too much. I'd never give up my existing tools to live within the hermetically sealed confines of Collaber. At best, I'd stick with Collaber's file sharing, perhaps pick and choose from among some of the more interesting tools on the site, and ignore most of the rest in favor of what I already have.