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Document management is all about workflow, control, and risk mitigation. Its objective is summarized perfectly by the two words in its name: "documents" and "management". It got its start in the legal departments of pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned to make sure that their companies were producing documentation in full compliance with regulatory requirements. A DMS thrives where there are a) documents already being created as part of a business process; and b) those documents need to be closely checked in, checked out, supervised, edited, approved, and stored following a consistent and audit-proof process.

Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.

When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records.

What I'm saying amounts to this: Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate.

unfortunately SocialText is not very good at linking to the documents in the obvious place (attachments).

"We probably over-invested in a platform that clearly didn't have the user base," said CTSi CEO Etienne Taylor.

The concept behind SuiteTwo was right, said Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young. Companies are adopting blogs, wikis, enterprise RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration and communication among their employees, partners and customers. "The market has moved in that direction pretty aggressively," he said.

"The problem with SuiteTwo wasn't the idea. The problem was the execution. They were trying to cobble together products from five or six independent companies, and it never looked like anything more than a bunch of applications that were duck-taped together," Young said.

While SuiteTwo failed to gain traction, vendor partners like NewsGator and Socialtext noticed that demand for a suite like that was real and expanded their own offerings beyond their niche areas to offer more comprehensive collaboration and communication functionality.

Ironically, Intel still seems interested in Enterprise 2.0, judging by a demo of a workplace social-networking system that its CEO, Paul Otellini, gave in November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, two years after SuiteTwo's introduction. The demoed system included Web-based enterprise collaboration tools for social networking, blogging, wikis, online meetings and syndicated feeds.

This is a disaster. It removes the communications aspect of the wiki.

Alternatively, Kwizcom have a Sharepoint wiki which might do the trick (plus a free evaluation version). http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=524&ProductSubNodeID=525

The top three on my list are Mediawiki, Confluence and SocialText. All of very INexpensive.Mediawiki is open source and free. We have not used open source software before, so it presents some new challenges.Confluence has a free download and a sharepoint connector.SocailText also has a SharePoint connector. The company is one of the thought leaders in wikis and social media.

I introduced Confluence in my previous job, and was very happy with it. However it's a challenge to maintain it with pure Windows point and click trained IT staff.

With Confluence, many many plug-ins and macros are available to present access to content on your web page.

Traction TeamPage has the feature you request (and then some) which is to send e-mail notification that shows the DIFF view of the old and new pages. You can fine tune which spaces you want to monitor at this level - and even fine tune it by author, tag or other search facility.

For categorizing any SharePoint items or documents cross-site based on centrally managed taxonomies and browse it by default navigation, category tree or A-Z directory you can use the Taxonomy Extension found at:http://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/default.aspx

Microsoft estimates MOSS pricing at $US4,424 for a server license and $US94 per client access license (in the U.S.).

MOSS' capabilities range from basic collaboration to portal creation and business intelligence content management. Yet MOSS' breadth is both too much and not enough for some midmarket users.

While the portal capabilities in MOSS are mature, for example, some companies are holding off on what they perceive as less-developed features in the suite, such as social networking, enterprise search and Web content management capabilities. These companies are waiting until Microsoft releases the next version, Koplowitz said.

Another potential drawback is a dearth in skill sets, as well as a lack of SharePoint documentation coming from Microsoft

On the surface, SharePoint is easy to get off the ground, but he said he's finding that people quickly get in over their heads.

Although SharePoint appears to be on a lot of CIOs' agendas, midmarket businesses have plenty of other choices.

There's integration with enterprise content management systems.

There are also third-party add-ons

Open Text Corp., with its ECM suite, is another company that both competes and integrates with SharePoint.

Competing products and vendors in the Web 2.0 space include Jive Software's Clearspace business social community software, which has customers in the midsized market, and Atlassian Software Systems Pty Ltd. and Socialtext Inc. These started out as wikis but are broadening their community-based collaborative offerings.

There's a lot more here to look at. For the price, this does seem like a viable alternative to get wiki functionality into your SharePoint environment. Of course, there are other alternatives, including Atlassian's Confluence, SocialText and even an open source enhanced wiki on CodePlex.

You can download a trial of the Wiki Plus solution or just buy it straight out for US$ 2,380.00

Email is most often the channel that the wiki-wary fall back on during this kind of transition, and the most dangerous for locking knowledge into a recipient list.

Mashable () has also published two large round ups of available wiki software in the past year: 30+ Solutions to Start Your Own Wiki and 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources.