When it comes to cross-company collaboration, IT departments have been caught between a rock and a hard place for years.

The rock on this occasion is the need to increase productivity. Increasingly, any business initiative worth any effort requires collaboration across multiple organizations. The hard place when it comes to collaboration is the whole issue of security. In today's business world it's very easy for a current ally to be tomorrow's competitor. That makes it imprudent to give people access to servers on your internal network.

Vendors have been trying to solve this basic problem since Lotus first tried to create an extranet network in partnership with AT&T almost 20 years ago. But more recently, we've seen the appearance of two new services that promise to finally reconcile productivity and security when it comes to cross company collaboration.

IBM has begun previewing a collection of Web applications under the code-name Bluehouse, which is a set of Web applications that IBM has either acquired or developed to foster collaboration. Essentially, Bluehouse gives customers a place on the Web managed by IBM where they can collaborate with each other using a whole range of applications.

In concept, Bluehouse is not much different than what a company called Exostar is trying to accomplish using an implementation of Microsoft SharePoint. Originally built for the aerospace industry, the ForumPass4 service provides a Web-based implementation of SharePoint that Exostar has wrapped a blanket of security technologies around. Exostar is betting that it will be a long time before Microsoft gets around to building an implementation of Windows Live that is secure enough for business-to-business collaboration and that people would prefer to work within a SharePoint environment that is similar to the one they work with inside their organizations. In addition, Exostar notes that because both the internal and external collaboration platforms use the same core technology, it will make it easier to share documents across both environments.

None of the tension between productivity and security has been lost on Oracle either, which is committed to making its new Beehive collaboration platform available as a service as well. But the one issue that IT organizations will have to wrestle with is that end users are going to still be tempted to use free services offered by Google or Microsoft, or less secure services such as WebEx from Cisco. The rationale will be that they only need to collaborate outside the company on occasion, and the odds that anything bad will happen to that information are remote.

IBM has yet to price it service, but by way of contrast the Exostar service costs about $40 per user per month. So countering the perception of free services, or ones that cost less, will be a matter of education and policy for IT organizations that value security.

Whatever path an IT organization ultimately chooses may not be as important at the moment compared with the simple fact that for the first time in memory they have some decent options when it comes to finally reconciling productivity with security