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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.

For many of us, a piece of chalk represents a time in our lives when anything was possible. A time when we were learning, building, communicating and most importantly - having fun. So when we decided to create a great collaborative web application, it seemed like the perfect name. However, like back in school, our imaginations started to run rampant with ideas. It didn't take long for us to realize what we really wanted. Something that takes us back - not to the classroom or playground, but to a world where we can create and collaborate freely, with friends, colleagues or even strangers. Designers, programmers, writers, family, friends - anyone. We all want tools that make us more productive, especially when we're working in groups. Chalk gives any team an immediate, real time collaborative environment thats accessible from any computer in the world. Do you want to share your ideas, code or graphics instantaneously with others? Chalk is already changing the way we work, and we're sure it will for you. Oh, and did we mention Web 2.0 yet? Chalk communication is in real time, powered by the excellent Ruby on Rails and AJAX, and it's fully compatible with Internet Explorer 5+, Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari. Not to mention the excellent social features we're still adding such as buddy lists, instant messaging and even entire community hub - all without a single page refresh and just a mouse click away. The end product is almost ready. We've come a long way in a short time, but we're about to graduate (hopefully with honors!). We hope you'll be there at the ceremony so you can take Chalk for a test drive. Until then, sit tight and tell your friends - after all, thats what Chalk is all about, sharing.