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if an organization doesn't get these things right, then whether they are using what many see as the "old Notes" or the "new SharePoint", disaster will result. The inherent flexibility of both platforms means that they can be used for great ends and to return great business and individual user benefits, or that same flexibility can result in really bad things happening. Many organizations have been down that route already with Notes, and many organizations are looking at SharePoint as a way of magically fixing all of those issues. It's not going to happen, because the key isn't in the technology ... it's in how it is introduced, embraced, talked about, trained on, and more. In general, if you can't get it right in Notes, you won't get it right in SharePoint

two independent analyst firms have issued warnings about SharePoint in the last two months. I hope organizations are taking note

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.

Best Practice Report The Enterprise Solutions practice at Avenue A | Razorfish recently published a best practice study on intranet, extranet and employee portal solutions based on research with industry leading organizations. The report provides guidance to managers on how to evolve their intranet, extranet or employee portal to generate greater, more measurable business value from it. Register here for a PDF of the full report Click below for a podcast summary of the report: Part 1 – Executive Summary Part 2 – Trends That Will Change Your Intranet Part 3 – Insights from Intranet Managers Workplace Offerings Enterprise Intranets Solutions (PDF) Sales & Marketing Solutions (PDF) Human Resources Solutions (PDF) Partner Extranets & Portals (PDF)

Enterprise Intranets Solutions (PDF)

Human Resources Solutions (PDF)

The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

Confluence is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. Adding, sharing and finding content has never been easier. These benefits come with all the additional features needed to make it a part of your business: Enterprise security Simple installation and management Attractive, user-friendly WYSIWYG interface Powerful tools for structuring and searching your wiki Professional features such as PDF export and automated refactoring An open API for extension and integration

“Campfire is dead simple to use and has an incredibly intuitive interface.” -TechCrunch “Campfire is one of the best apps of 2006.It's a godsend for groups.” -Lifehacker

multilingual content management. It handles Chinese, Japanese, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew with ease

Instant, Full-text Searching All content is searchable immediately; even Word documents and PDF files.

business processes part of the document workflow