PBworks, which used to be PBwiki until a month ago when it realized the name didn’t fit anymore, is targeting professional services and agencies with a newfangled PBworks Project Edition that combines hosted collaboration with project management.

Its market is accounting firms as well as design, marketing, advertising and PR agencies, folks like Ogilvy and Deloitte that can use the widgetry to collaborate with clients, share plans and gather feedback.

The widgetry, which is supposed to be better than Microsoft Project and is built on LAMP, offers users a dedicated workspace that can, say, see a project through to deliverables or manage the design and launch of a new web site, from requirements gathering to final approvals.

Heck, the workspace itself can be the final deliverable in some cases.

Project Edition combines wiki collaboration, document management, workflow and project management and cuts way down on e-mail. Plus folks involved always know the status of things.

PBworks has been providing businesses with hosted collaboration solutions for the last four years. It’s taken its existing PBworks widgetry – which will henceforth be called Standard Edition – and added so-called multi-workspace networks as well as what it terms “organic” project management, organic meaning actual work. (My, what a concept!)

Anyway, a “network” lets a PBworks customer create workspaces for every project and manage them in a single enterprise-wide environment. Team members can join any workspace in the network and add clients, partners and contractors as “guest” users of relevant workspaces. This lets a Project Edition customer set up a custom workspace for each client, or even each client project.

PBworks provides unlimited storage for documents and files and mobile access from iPhone and Blackberries.

Users can do full-text Lucene-based searches (even in document content) across the entire network, as well as in a particular workspace. And there’s single sign-on complements of Active Directory and LDAP.

PBworks project management offers traditional project management concepts such as tasks and milestones. Team members can assign tasks and roll them up into bigger milestones. Each user can view tasks and milestones for a particular workspace/project, as well as their personal tasks and milestones across the entire network.

Project Edition is available immediately at a starting price of $20/user/month. Guest licenses for clients and contractors are free. The company prefers annual contracts and getting paid upfront.

Existing Professional Edition customers can upgrade to Project Edition for $2,000; Professional Plus customers can upgrade for $1,000.

Standard Edition is available immediately at a starting price of $8/user/month.

PBworks users include FedEx and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company hosts a reported 900,000 workspaces, mostly for individuals, with 10,000 paying customers.

Its investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures, Seraph Group, Sippl Investments (as in Roger Sippl, the founder of Informix, now an IBM property) and Ron Conway, the angel investor who was early into Google and PayPal.