The surging popularity of telecommuting means there’s also a great demand for infrastructure to support the work-from-home lifestyle. Email and instant messaging have been useful in the past. Unfortunately, they are not very efficient in supporting online client-agent collaboration. I’ve been looking for a tool to help me manage my projects with other people for some time now. There are many programs out there, but what bugged me was that most of them are only one-way tools. They provide the means to update clients about the project status, but not the other way around. The problem is that many tasks involve getting deliverables from clients as well, like specs needed, certain documents, and the like. A service called Homecourt Client Extranet attempts to bridge this gap.

It’s an online collaboration tool which uses a sports paradigm that’s both easy to understand and simple to use. Recently, I was able to talk to Aaron Vegh of Innoveghtive, the company behind Homecourt. He says, “The chief principle of Homecourt is the assignment of responsibility.” On the main page, there are two courts – yours and your client’s. Just create a task and assign it to either your court or theirs. Each task can have its own collapsible thread of comments, eliminating the need to sift through tons of email just to follow the discussions. You can even attach files to comments, and put tags to organize them better.

An added bonus is the ability to customize Homecourt with your company logo, background color, and subdomain URL, making it ideal for you to embed it within your company’s website. Aaron informed me that their development team is very dynamic, and future plans include having an API for developers, OpenID support, vCard support, notifications via IM, SMS, RSS and Twitter, the ability to export data into XML and other formats.

After trying it out for myself, I was impressed with tool’s overall design. Of course, there’s always room for improvement. In Homecourt’s case, the invoice system could be more robust and detailed. It would help a lot if each invoice could have itemization in place for clarity (after all, clients are very fussy about what they’re paying for). And since some projects involve multiple points of contact (3 or more), it would be great to see Homecourt become expandable to meet this need.

As it is, the tool is quite useful for streamlining collaborative workflow. If you’re interested in giving it a go, you’ll be glad to know that Innoveghtive is offering a free trial. Head on over to the Homecourt page to find out more and sign up.