Altova has reached the public beta stage for its MetaTeam project collaboration cloud service. Launched under a banner of descriptive terms common to many collaboration tools, MetaTeam champions "transparency and information accessibility" as well as "project accountability" for individuals' roles and responsibilities.

But Altova says that MetaTeam is "not just for developers" — and so business teams in any capacity or function can then potentially access these tools to enhance collaboration and efficiency in managing projects of any kind. In addition, Altova enthuses that MetaTeam has proven attractive "downward" to departmental managers and committees.

The company describes its new product as nothing less than a "revolutionary new cloud service" with threaded discussions and customizable email alerts to promote communication and clarity, plus integrated apps for managing the following functions:

• to-dos
• team member roles and responsibilities
• project-specific terms and documentation
• structured decision-making
• team member information and more

"Altova has dedicated itself to meeting the needs of development teams since its founding in 1992. Each of our XML, database, and UML tools is designed to simplify development projects and help you create high-quality applications. MetaTeam extends this mission even further," said Alexander Falk, CEO Altova.

MetaTeam's key functionality/features are called out as follows: a "to-dos" app provides a hierarchical task-based overview of projects to help track assignments, deadlines, and statuses. More specifically, "deep integration across apps" keeps deadline-driven tasks connected to the big picture, says Altova.

A glossary app is designed to allow teams to define a project-specific vocabulary, ensuring everyone uses the same terms for the same concepts. Glossary terms are automatically cross-linked wherever they occur in MetaTeam, providing instant clarity. As expected, there is a "roles" app for responsibilities and skills and FTEs (full time equivalents).

NOTE: Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a unit that indicates the workload of an employed person (or student) in a way that makes workloads comparable across various contexts. FTE is often used to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or to track cost reductions in an organization. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time.

There is also a decisions app for direction project goals and objectives; a knowledge base app to help teams organize and share vital project information with an easy-to-use, fully integrated wiki; and, as previously mentioned, there are threaded discussions to foster and document collaborative efforts.