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It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media Written by Sarah Perez / April 16, 2008 2:00 PM / 52 Comments digg_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/real_people_dont_have_time_for_social_media.php'; digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff'; digg_skin = 'compact'; Let's be honest here: we're all a bunch of social media addicts. We're junkies. Whether it's a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we're all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don't have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?

I’d like to point a finger at the font downloads. Loads of applications on windows (an therefore wine) depend on the corefonts. These fonts are not part of wine and can’t be packed together with wine because of different licenses. So if You had apps, showing only symbols and garbage, this is for You

  Salesforce's new mashups will deliver full componentization of its analytical dashboards - enabling users to create, share, and combine data components. Essentially this means that customers can pick and choose the best analytical components from a variety of vendors; combining them into a single view on their salesforce dashboard. Salesforce is hoping that lots of new components will be created and shared on their AppExchange.

Corporate Wikis reviewed: Confluence, JotSpot, WetPaint, Socialtext by Troy Angrignon on Mon 10 Jul 2006 06:30 AM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis") Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles." It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.