Altova, a key player in the software tools industry, today announced the commercial availability of MetaTeam, its performance boosting online project collaboration environment for high performance teamwork.

Altova has long made complex technical best practices straightforward. Now MetaTeam offers practical solutions to the organizational challenges high performance teams face every day. Knowledge workers in all industries and disciplines talk about the challenges surrounding team collaboration and project management. And, indeed, projects, committees, and working groups are inherently failure prone. Studies¹ routinely find that well over 50% of projects fail to hit their budgets and schedule constraints, and/or are considered failures by their organizations. While point solutions addressing the components of project failure exist, there was no single product that adequately solved these problems.

Based on input from customers, partners, and co-workers frustrated by attempting to manage teamwork through endless email chains, outdated spreadsheets, and other common but cumbersome project management tools, Altova set out to create a new kind of team collaboration solution. MetaTeam is the only tool of its kind that seamlessly integrates the three areas that are vital for boosting team performance: sophisticated project management, collaborative decision making, and team performance management.

MetaTeam helps teams perform better by:
• Taking the guesswork out of leading a team
• More accurately showing how people work together, and who can help
• Reducing conflict and adding consistency to decision-making
• Encouraging organizational best practices across all of a company’s teams

Mzinga, a leading provider of enterprise social software solutions and services, was an early MetaTeam beta tester. They have been using MetaTeam with great success in their organization.

“Our team is distributed geographically, which presents numerous challenges in a fast paced marketing department. We had a need to get up and running quickly,” said Mike Merriman, Vice President of Marketing at Mzinga. “MetaTeam gave us a way to hit the ground running without having to stop and rethink the way we work. The more we use MetaTeam, the more we can see it playing a role in other parts of our business.”

MetaTeam is designed to eliminate the difficulties and causes of productivity loss that can plague teams. And its streamlined interface requires no installation or training. Users simply log in and start working. As a team’s work grows in complexity they find MetaTeam’s power grows with them.

MetaTeam improves individual team members’ performance by clarifying their goals, identifying who can help them meet their responsibilities, illustrating how decisions will be made, clearly defining what terminology means and where to write documentation and ask questions. All teams do these basic activities in some way, and now MetaTeam lets teams up their game with transparency, efficiency, and more agile collaborative practices.

“Real-world studies show that lack of engagement, poor quality work, poor decision-making, and difficulty finding information kill teams. All of these problems can be avoided with better team organization,” said David Kershaw, VP of Cloud Services at Altova. “MetaTeam is truly an eye opening new approach to collaboration that anyone can use to help their team be successful.”

Availability and Pricing
MetaTeam is sold as an annual subscription and is priced per seat. Its cost structure is designed to be affordable for teams of any size, with prices starting at $250 per year for five seats, including support. Larger numbers of seats are eligible for bulk discounts. A free, 30-day trial is available for all customers.

For additional information or to try MetaTeam free for 30 days visit: http://metateam.net/