There are dozens of online project management companies, including Seattle upstarts such as LiquidPlanner, Smartsheet.com, Kamune and Daptiv. Now, you can add one more to the list: Guppers.

Started by 14-year Microsoft veteran Andy Harjanto, the company recently unveiled a trial version of a service that allows co-workers to share documents, emails, text messages and other key items in one convenient spot. While there's plenty of competition in that arena, Harjanto is hoping that Guppers will stand out.

"We believe business product(s) should be fun, engaging and productive," says Harjanto, a former program manager at Microsoft. "Many ... products/services in the market today are pretty dry."

It plans add some spice to the project management arena by making it easier for teams scattered all over the world to collaborate through their preferred communication systems, whether email, Facebook or text message. In fact, Guppers has been putting the technology to the test itself, with its six employees located on three continents. 

Harjanto

"As more and more companies collaborate globally, Guppers is well positioned to accommodate this, as we’ve experienced ourselves," he said. "In Asia and Europe especially, SMS is used for business communication, while in the U.S. – email is still predominantly used as the communication channel."

What sets Guppers apart from the multitude of competitors is its ease of use, said Harjanto.

It takes only minutes to set up, and once an organization has activated the system employees can start storing documents and conversations related to certain projects.

For example, pilot customers have been using the service to update lists via text message or to share documents from email for construction projects and other group-oriented tasks.

Guppers employees — who live in four different time zones — have created a community list to keep track of whether bugs related to the new service are being fixed.

Harjanto said that the bug fixes and work items can be updated via email, text message or directly through the Guppers web service.

“If the bug is resolved (or) closed, the assigned tester/owner gets notification as well,” said Harjanto.

In an added twist, Harjanto also said that work items can be projected to a flat screen so various team members can view the issues at hand in a conference room. (Harjanto has a small LED screen on his desk to keep track of activities in the Guppers work space.)

And he said they are applying many of the popular features of consumer-oriented social networking sites — comments, recommendations and the ability to “follow” other participants in the community — to the service.

“We hope that the social computing technology increase the productivity,” he said.

Interestingly, this isn't the first company that Harjanto and Guppers co-founder, Tumin Chook, have started. After graduating from Eastern Michigan University, the two entrepreneurs started NexVision, which specialized in Microsoft Windows 3.0 applications.  But Harjanto said they were "young and stupid" and the startup quickly ran out of money. 

After that experience, Harjanto and Chook lost touch for more than a decade. They reconnected on Facebook recently, and they started talking about new business ideas.

Amazingly, the two entrepreneurs had been thinking about ways to solve the same problem, which was a new way for people to collaborate on projects and share information across various communication channels.

"The multi-channel communication solves not only cultural gap, but also generation gaps," said Harjanto, adding that younger workers may prefer text messages over email.

Harjanto admits that there's plenty of competition, including offerings from Google, Jive Software, Basecamp, Huddle.net and Yammer.

"Hopefully, that's a good sign -- that the market is pretty big," he said. "That is my hope." 

But he also said the market is growing as companies look to incorporate new technologies to streamline the way people communicate.

Guppers plans to make money by offering premium versions of the service at $49 and $99 per month, which includes more storage, additional text messages and other features.

"Most of our competitors do not have SMS solutions," he said. "If they do, they’re only available in the U.S."

Guppers is self-funded to date with money from the founders.