eXpresso Online Spreadsheet Manager for Excel, that is.

eXpresso is delivering a Software as a Service offering which promises to ease collaboration issues with Excel spreadsheets, a problem of monumental concern within and around most corporate accounting departments. Trying to version-track and manage permissions appropriately on hundreds or thousands of Excel documents quickly becomes a gargantuan task, one that is often off the IT department's radar because it is left to individual staff to corral and share their own files. Typically, IT only becomes involved when an issue with a particularly vital spreadsheet tips over from problematic category into the catastrophic.

Saavy CIOs know that this is generally because the information being stored by that mechanism usually isn't really appropriate to it-if you have information that requires that complex a system of sharing and auditing, and that many varying utilization requirements, it probably belongs in a database of some sort (whether customized or an off-the-shelf line of business application). But accountants love spreadsheets, which leads to an interesting question brought about by the release of this product: should you argue to solve those problems the "right" way, or point your users toward this SaaS offering and let them take care of it with the tools they know best?