Share Excel files SaaS style

  To say that "companies run on Excel," as George Langan suggests is only a slight exaggeration. The data in Excel spreadsheets inform much of the thinking in most businesses. Working with Excel data, however, is generally a solitary process. If people want to share their Excel work, they do so as email attachments, which is not particularly secure. Langan, who's the CEO of eXpresso Corp. in Menlo Park, Calif., wants to turn Excel spreadsheets into a multiuser collaborative process that is secure and auditable. Next month the company plans to take its eXpresso software as a service out of its beta phase and begin charging $80 per year per seat for the Professional version. (There will be feature-reduced version, Open eXpresso, that will be free and appliance for the enterprise in Q1 2008.) The company created a clever way to share spreadsheets online. According to Langan, when an Excel file is uploaded to the eXpresso site, the service turns the file into a binary large object (or BLOB), which can then be broken into the columns and rows of a relational database. Although everyone continues to work in Excel, changes are made in the database. Multiple people can work on the same spreadsheet in real time, Langan says. You can set a "safe point" in the service so you can always roll back to a known good file. Individuals can set access control with privileges for reading, writing, printing and other rights for files. During the collaboration process, instant messages are saved in a searchable data store. Sure beats sending Excel files here, there and everywhere.