(FORTUNE Small Business) – If you've picked up one of those business-think books lately, you have probably read what you already knew: Work these days tends to be project-based. What you might not have read is how best to manage that project, with road-warrior employees, outside consultants, and telecommuters making work coordination among an often dispersed team difficult.

As with so many issues these days, lots of companies think the Web is the answer. Web services generally known as virtual offices let you centralize various forms of team communication--discussion boards, shared calendars, address books, document sharing--on a private, password-protected site.

HotOffice (www.hotoffice.com) is typical of most of the genre. Companies get all the bells and whistles mentioned above plus Web-based e-mail accounts for $12.95 per user per month (volume discounts start at 21 users). None of these features is best of class, and most of your people are likely to have e-mail and a calendar already, but everything's simple and in one place. HotOffice's progeny--including Intranets.com, Planet Intra (www.planetintra.com), and TeamOn.com--are all a little slicker and cheaper, but they offer more or less the same choices.

A couple of other services, while still flawed, are more project-centric. ERoom (www.eroom.com) has no calendar or e-mail but lets you poll teammates on divisive issues. QuickTeam (www.quickteam.com) lets you assign and prioritize tasks within the group, although it doesn't integrate with any non-Web applications.

The big problem with these services is that they work great while you're connected to the Website using them, but if you're offline you might as well be on an island somewhere. Several of these products have shared contact lists, but those work badly, if at all, with your separate mail client. Most, including eRoom and HotOffice, let you share Microsoft Office documents, but this isn't true Web-based collaboration, because only one person can work on a document at a time. And if you use less-common programs such as QuickBooks, you might not even be able to share data files.

Virtual offices tend to be cheap enough (anywhere from free to $25 per user per month) that the hassles of HotOffice or one of its clones are worth it to see if they work on a single project. It just might be that touch that brings the team together. If it works for you, buy yourself a potboiler next time instead of a business book.