PBworks today announced the availability of Project Edition, a version of the company’s hosted wiki that’s designed for the client-facing projects common to professional services firms, such as consultancies, accounting firms, design, PR, advertising, and marketing agencies.

The new software combines PBworks’ wiki collaborative platform with a project coordination workspace that enables more traditional project management activities like progress tracking, task list, organizing tasks into project milestones, and conducting discussions associated with task list items.

A busy manager could check the new project coordination workspace to get a quick status update, use the discussion feature associated with each task to communicate with a team member, or add a new task and assign it to someone – all without ever sending an email. This feature alone makes the new PBworks Project Edition very attractive.

In PBworks Project Edition, these workspaces are part of a network – a central point from which all of an organization’s workspaces and and access permissions are managed. Permissions can be set so that employees of an agency can freely join project workspaces as needed, and give clients access to relevant workspaces.

What’s really interesting about this is the pricing structure: Project Edition costs $20/user/month for people within the firm or agency, but accounts created for a firm’s clients are free. PBworks reasoned that making that second type of account free takes away the complication of buying more accounts for clients, trying to “recycle” accounts as projects finish and new ones start, and the resulting exposure PBworks gets when a firm’s clients use Project Edition may result in new business directly from those clients who want access to PBworks for their own use.