I received a press release from Erick Mott, CEO of Creator Connection, with the slug "Secure, Internet workspaces for individuals and groups who want to use e-mail and the Web to communicate, get organized, and complete projects."

I was intrigued enough to go take a look, and fiddle with the hosted service. Here's a few observations, and recommendations for Creator Connection and possible users.

Trying out the service requires signing up, and paying the first month's fees ($19.95 monthly through paypal) although there is a 30 day money back guarantee. This is the opposite of how some other competitors (like Groove, to name just one) are set up. eRoom doesn't offer free kick the tires anymore, either, so maybe Erick is just going with the post-dot-bomb flow.

I had a few minor snags, now rectified, which Erick believes were caused by his personally (and wrongly) configuring my space. His tech folks fixed that, and it seems to work as advertised.

Creatorbase is both a community of individual users, and a place to create project-oriented workspaces. You can in principle become involved in the community of people, although at the moment there aren't very many people in the community, and try as I might I never could figure out how to search for people with specific interests. All I was able to figure out was how to search for users by name -- not very helpful. Presumably, this social tool aspect of the service will be amplified in the future.

Regarding the service as a project workspace system, there seems to be a great deal of (useful) emphasis on access controls -- very sophisticated approach to manage policies in groups and subgroups -- that makes the system attractive to complex projects. Consider the case where you would like to have a project management team within a larger project team with more access rights than the group as a whole. Likewise, there is finegrained control of documents managed within the system, including provisions for locking docs, checking them out via email, versioning, and a routing for document approval -- very cool.

Another feature is offline folder synchronization -- which seems to work (I think) but also requires manually synching when connected. This will support offline access to project information. I haven't extensively fiddled with it -- synching, disconnecting, modifying content, reconnecting, attempting to synch -- but it is in principle supported.

Calendars and task objects are supported, although with only a limited synch capability for the calendar entries for Outlook and none for tasks.

Creatorbase seems to support three flavors of unrelated user information -- profiles (the information that subscribers enter into the system), contacts (which are like Outlook contacts), and users (people invited to join groups). These may interrelate in some way, but I don't understand how, which made any use of these types of information confusing to me (but then again, I'm easily confused).

The folder metaphor is extensively exploited -- perhaps too extensively -- in the Creatorbase UI. Nesting of folders inside of folders is fine as a technique for partitioning, but Creatorbase lacks a top level status "dashboard" associated with projects or subprojects. There is a so-called "dashboard" but it is really just a folder of links to other information, and can't be presented like a project "dashboard". My bet is that use of the system will require way too much moving up and down in the folder hierarchy. I got lost several times. The solution may be to provide a different sort of navigation and view management, like a Explorer-like folder widget, and something like Lotus Notes "views" so that subordinate information (such as the postings in a discussion folder, or the tasks in a task folder) can be presented as a scrollable list of records at a higher level in the folder hierarchy. This would allow real dashboards to be created, and would minimize up and down movement.

There is no way to use Creatorbase as currently configured to support large online communities with anonymous users. Erick states, in fairness, that his service is not targeting that need. But it seems a shame to me that this limitation has been imposed. I recommend that the company consider creating a special class of user, with very limited acces rights -- namely the ability to read various docs and information, and the ability to create (moderated) discussion entries -- and then allow open access to public groups. Not only does this open up a larger market for Creatorbase, it would create a viral form of marketing, since community creators could simply post the URL to public communities on other websites, or in emails, and avoid the pain of actually registering casual users. Think it over, Erick.

Creatorbase looks to be an affordable solution considering its rich content management capabilities. $19.95/month allows you to invite up to 50 users to participate in multiple projects. For the SOHO or small business market, this is a true bargain. Creator Connection has a way to go on the UI, but a few new features would certainly remove my concerns in that regard. And the notion of integrating both project workspaces and social tool-style community interaction is a great idea, full of promise.