US Army Wikified
Collaboration, SaaS March 17th, 2009
WetPaint is one of my early “discoveries”, three years ago I called them the “wiki-less” wiki, as it blended wiki-like, forum-like and blog-like features long before it became fashionable. I haven’t followed them closely, but apparently they’ve been growing nicely, and today I saw this post:
First of all, it’s a truly professionally maintained wiki, with a Wiki 101 for new users, then details of the Syllabus, Lessons and Assignements, Cadet Fitness Challenge..etc. They use text, photos, videos, podcasts – you name it, this is a fully featured interactive social site.
Second, I grew up in a country where anything even remotely related to the Army was surrounded with utmost secrecy, and I am still somewhat amazed at the level on information publicly available about the US military. Granted, there are no strategic plans or weapons specs in this wiki, but still … 
Third… quick IM reaction from the first person I shared this news with:
Cool. Why is US Army resorting to free sites? Credit crunch
What a perfect fit for the Power of Less theme I just wrote about earlier today, in my Web 2.0 Expo post. Major Rea and his cadets are using Wetpaint instead of Blackboard, the market leader commercial software for Education. No, the US Army as a whole did not replace Blackboard with Wetpaint – but this particular unit did. It’s a good start – just like corporations using Google Apps or Zoho Business services here and there … usage grows, initially it may just be leverage in licence negotiations with Blackboard, Microsoft and the like… but one day, who knows…
. It’s nice to see the US Army SaaS-ified.
Oh, and for that Power of Less: it’s certainly less when it comes to what hey have to spend on software – but I’m not even sure it’s less when it comes to usability, participation. Could this also become the case of Less is More?
(from the PE350 video page)
(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)
Tags: Army, Collaboration, less is more, military, power of less, Social Networking, US Army, User Generated Content, w2e, web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo, web2expo, wetpaint, wikis
Email is Still Not Dead, and Won’t Be For a While
Collaboration, Personal Productivity September 17th, 2008
I can’t believe the email is dead theme, popped up again, this time on SocialMediaToday, originally on OnlineMarketerBlog. I responded in detail on CloudAve.
Image credit: CrunchGear.
Tags: Collaboration, email, facebook, IM, online documents, SMS, Twitter, wiki, wikis
Email is Not in Danger, Thank You
Collaboration, Personal Productivity July 2nd, 2008
Yet-another-email-is-dead (OK, just in danger) article, this time by Alex Iskold @ ReadWriteWeb. Alex adds Twitter’s increasing popularity to the standard “reusable” arguments: teenagers using IM, or increasingly SMS, and most recently Facebook instead of email which they find cumbersome, slow and unreliable – hence email usage will decline.
I beg to disagree as I did before, and before. Sure, I also get frustrated by the occasional rapid-fire exchange of one-line emails when by the 15th round we both realize the conversation should have started on IM. Most of teenagers’ interaction is social, immediate, and SMS works perfectly well in those situations. However, we all enter business, get a job..etc sooner or later, like it or not… Our communication style changes along with that – often requiring a build-up of logical structure, sequence, or simply a written record of facts, and email is vital for this type of communication. As much fun Twitter may be, I rarely have (or see) serious ongoing discussions there – in other words Tweets are in addition, instead of email.
Email in business is being “attacked” from another direction though: for project teams, planning activity, collaboratively designing a document, staging an event… etc email is a real wasteful medium. Or should I say, it’s the perfect place for information to get buried. This type of communication is most effective using a wiki, or an increasing number of online tools supporting native collaboration. Yesterday I reviewed a startup CEO’s ppt deck, and it took us 4 rounds of emailed versions of the same presentation – it would have been a lot easier to collaborate on just one “master” presentation in Zoho Show.
So yes, I agree with Alex, even in business we’re offloading stuff off email. But email is far from dead, or even in danger, and it won’t be any time soon. We just have to learn to use the right tool in the right situation. As usual, Rod Boothby says it better in a single chart:
Rod’s chart is almost two years old, but still valid – perhaps I would update it to say “Wiki and collaborative documents”. My own post here is a slightly updated version of an older one from last year, which in turn was an almost verbatim reprint of another one from July 2006. I rarely re-post old stuff, but in this case I felt it still made a valid point. Next year, when someone brings up the “is email dead?” question, I’ll dust it off again.
Tags: Collaboration, email, facebook, IM, online documents, SMS, Twitter, wiki, wikis, zoho show
Wiki Review or Rant?
Collaboration, SaaS April 1st, 2008
I am deeply interested in wikis, and business oriented ones in particular, in fact was considering doing a fairly detailed comparative study, so I got really excited seeing on twitter that Tom Raftery posted an Enterprise wiki review. Too bad it’s not a review; it’s a rant that lacks any methodology or real comparison.
He goes at length describing the installation nightmare:
The setup of the Confluence wiki was far from straightforward. It took two of us the best part of a day to simply install it. Remember that as I was doing this for it@cork, this was not billable time. I was installing it on my own server and because Confluence requires TomCat as its webserver it had to run on a separate port to Apache. This meant several people couldn’t view it in their organisations.
Sounds to me like a case of bad platform choice. Now, I am by far not as technically inclined as Tom is, and am biased: I won’t touch anything that needs to be installed. That’s what Software as a Service is for. Which, incidentally is an available option for Confluence, so how Tom got into comparing “hard-to-install” Confluence with hosted PBwiki and Socialtext is beyond me – it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. And there’s not much of a comparison either… here’s all he has to say about two other products:
By the way, I did also try out DekiWiki and Twiki but I ruled them out quite early on.
That’s not a very detailed review, if you ask me. DekiWiki is downloaded about 3000 times a day (!), so some people must like it… even though their acquisition of SocialText was just an April 1 joke. 
Joke apart, a word on picking the right tool for the right job: perhaps you don’t even need an “enterprise class” wiki for a conference. The official Oracle Wiki is based on Wetpaint, a decidedly consumer and community-focused platform.
My personal takeaway from this to me is to look at PBWiki: when I last checked it out, it was a baby-wiki for some reason popular in geek circles; apparently it has grown up. I’m not sure I will get to do the wiki review I’ve been planning, but in the meantime if Tom decides to write a real one, I am looking forward to reading it.
Update: Tom responded in a comment below. The hosted version of Confluence is NOT available under the community license. He ruled out DekiWiki as when he figured he could not to create Groups. There’s more, please read his comment.
Tags: atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, dekiwiki, mindtouch, pbwiki, socialtext, wetpaint, wiki, wikis
Is GSpot (Google + JotSpot) Release Imminent?
Collaboration, SaaS, Startups February 4th, 2008
This is a speculative post. As it is widely known, JotSpot, a very user-friendly wiki and application-platform-wannabe was acquired by Google in October 2006, only to be closed for new users for a long time. Existing users could continue to access their information free.
There was a lot of speculation as to when it would re-surface and in what shape. I certainly liked the wiki before they “disappeared”, and was hoping The Goog would take the opportunity to do more than just re-label it and make it more scalable:
I hope that means they rethought everything and integrated JotSpot well into a number of offerings.
- It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs & Spreadsheets UI.
- It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups – in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and JotSpot could very well be merged / integrated.
- Finally JotSpot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar..etc) all of which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.
Perhaps we’re getting close to the re-emergence of JotSpot (yes, I know it won’t be called GSpot, but why not have some fun?). Obviously this is the speculative part, but several users report that JotSpot wikis disappear from the net. Users are understandably getting excited:
Is it over? Just like this? Without notice?
I just finished a major rework on the site. And 4 hours after it:
boom, it disappeared.Any help?
Where is all the data gone?
The main jot.com page displays a Network Solutions domain capture page.
I can still access www.jot.com, which displays the standard notification about the Google transaction, and, more importantly I can get into my jot account using the direct URL: account.jot.com. I am using OpenDNS. Perhaps the difference is a matter of DNS propagation, and they are changing in preparation of the Google Wiki launch?
My previous coverage:
- JotSpot Google Deal – Who Wins, Why it’s Big:First Thoughts
- Losers of the Google / JotSpot Deal
- JotSpot…Gspot … Google Wiki
(Hat tip: Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop)
Update (2/6): Mashable list 14 of what they call Online Spreadsheet Applications (clearly, not all are) and surprise, surprise, JotSpot is one of them. That’s a joke. As much as Iiked JotSpot as a wiki, it failed to become an application platform, and it certainly isn’t (hasn’t been) a spreadsheet. Like I wrote before:
Just because a page looks like an application, it does not mean it really is. Try to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Jot Spreadsheet page, you’ll get a warning that it does not import formulas. Well, I’m sorry, but what else is there in a spreadsheet but formulas? The previous name, Tracker was fair: it’s a table where you track lists, but not a spreadsheet. (more)
But whatever we think of the former JotSpot Tracker capabilities, it’s hard to see it left intact once Google releases what they turned JotSpot into. Google themselves have a much better online spreadsheet, I certainly hope for their sake that they will integrate their apps with JotSpot, and kill off the overlap.
(FYI: The real online spreadsheets out of Mashable’s 14 are Google , Zoho, EditGrid, ThinkFree. )
Tags: Collaboration, editgrid, Google, google wiki, jot, Jotspot, thinkfree, wikis, zoho
25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment + 1 Tip on How to NOT Use Presentations
Collaboration, Personal Productivity December 18th, 2007
Thanks to Stewart Mader I found this presentation on 25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment. As someone deeply interested in wikis and their use in business, I attempted to read through, but grew increasingly frustrated. Not because of the content, which is good, but the format. Why on earth have they (who?) delivered this in a presentation format?
All slides in this deck are divided in two half, one textual, the other graphical. Consequently they all show signs of the two cardinal sins of “committing” presentations.
1. – There’s way too much text. If you want me to read a story, you might as well type it up, use paragraphs, title fonts, bullet-points…etc, but don’t pretend it’s a presentation.
2. – Visuals are supposed to illustrate your point, capture my attention, shocking me, entertain me – whatever, just do something! This slide deck uses identical (rather boring, but that’s beyond the point) graphics on all 25 slides, which is just as good as no graphics at all.
In summary, the textual half of each slide is way too busy, the graphical half is a missed opportunity: this is NOT a presentation.
What’s a good presentation like? Enjoy the winners of the World’s Best Presentation Contest on Slideshare (hat tip: Guy Kawasaki)
Tags: atlassian, powerpoint, ppt, presentation, wiki adoption, wiki deployment, wikis
Email is Still Not Dead
Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking November 15th, 2007
Yet-another-email-is-dead-article, this time on Slate. It’s the same old argument: teenagers using IM, or increasingly SMS, and most recently Facebook instead of email which they find cumbersome, slow and unreliable – hence email usage will decline.
I beg to disagree. Sure, I also get frustrated by the occasional rapid-fire exchange of one-line emails when by the 15th round we both realize the conversation should have started on IM. Most of teenagers’ interaction is social, immediate, and SMS works perfectly well in those situations. However, we all enter business, get a job..etc sooner or later, like it or not… Our communication style changes along with that – often requiring a build-up of logical structure, sequence, or simply a written record of facts, and email is vital for this type of communication.
Email in business is being “attacked” from another direction though: for project teams, planning activity, collaboratively designing a document, staging an event… etc email is a real wasteful medium. Or should I say, it’s the perfect place for information to get buried. This type of communication is most effective using a wiki. No, email is not dead, and it won’t be any time soon. But we all have to learn to use the right tool in the right situation. As usual, Rod Boothby says it better in a single chart:
(The above post is an almost verbatim reprint of an older one from July 2006. I rarely re-post old stuff, but in this case I felt it was still a valid point. And it still will be, next year when someone declares email dead again. )
Beating Social Media’s 90:9:1 Rule in the Enterprise
Collaboration, Social Networking October 23rd, 2007
The 80/20 rule is out (so last century), 90:9:1 is in: the rule of participation in public communities, social networks, wikis:
- 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
- 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
- 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
90:9:1 is a pretty good fit for most public wikis, starting with Wikipedia. Ben Gardner observed very different numbers: 50:25:x (he does not specify “x”). The interesting number here is 25, or it’s relationship to 50, meaning:
When the same question was asked about our corporate wiki ~50% of those present had used it but about ~50% of those had edited it.
Active participation in a corporate environment is much higher than in the public domain – this is not really a surprise, since the corporate wiki is used by people of real identities and reputations, and most importantly, shared objectives. This is also why Prof. Andrew McAfee hasn’t seen vandalism – a plague of public wikis – in the corporate world at all.
I suspect that 25% can go a lot higher, depending on the purpose of the wiki. When after the initial “grassroots movement” management fully embraces the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, it becomes the fabric of everyday business, where people create, collaborate, and in the process capture information. When the wiki is the primary work / collaboration platform, participation is no longer optional. Not when the answer to almost any question is “it’s on the wiki.”
My earlier posts on this subject:
(hat tip: Stewart Mader)
Tags: 90:90:1, Collaboration, enterprise 2.0, enterprise wiki, KM, Knowledge Management, wiki, wiki adoption, wikis
A Confluence of the Wiki and Document/Folder Worlds
Collaboration, Enterprise Software October 17th, 2007
confluence
1: a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point <a happy confluence of weather and scenery>
2 a: the flowing together of two or more streams
b: the place of meeting of two streams
c: the combined stream formed by conjunction
Today we’re seeing the confluence of two worlds: the flow-oriented thinking and collaboration, represented by Confluence, the market-leading enterprise wiki, and the more traditional approach of documents, lists, folders, represented by Microsoft SharePoint. Or perhaps it’s a right-brain / left-brain thing. I’ve talked about it at length, and since Jeremiah, Web Prophet says backlinking is OK, I’ll just do that, instead of repeating myself: Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle.
Now, as important forward-looking visioning is, successful business leaders recognize what the market wants today, not where they’d like to lead them tomorrow. Recognizing that Microsoft Office is deeply entrenched in the corporate workplace, Atlassian first added Webdav capabilities to Confluence (drag-and-drop files into the wiki, single click on attachment to edit them in the original MS Office format and save back to the wiki). But customers wanted more, according to Jeffrey Walker, President:
..meeting with customers and analysts, SharePoint came up in every meeting. “We have growing groups who love the wiki, and long standing users of Microsoft and now SharePoint. Help!”, customers asked..
The result of today’s joint Microsoft and Atlassian announcement of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence. The initial features include:
- Search: Users can search SharePoint and Confluence content together from one place.
- Content sharing: From within SharePoint, users can embed Confluence page contents allowing users to blend content. This also includes Confluences numerous plugins.
- Linking: Within Confluence, users can access SharePoint document facilities. By including SharePoint lists and content within Confluence, users, in a single click, can edit Microsoft Office documents.
- Single Sign-On and Security: With one login, users can access both systems while seeing only what they have permission to view.
In short, access your information, whether you’re the wiki-flow type or the create-save-hide-in-folders type
The screenprint above shows a Confluence page (with the charting plugin) embedded within, and editable directly from SharePoint. For more, check out the feature tour.
Jevon MacDonald is pondering about the business realities behind this deal:
The question that weighs most heavily is: is there enough incentive for Microsoft to participate in this partnership in any significant way? The immediate economics aren’t obvious for Microsoft, which leaves us with two options:
- but I’m not giving those options away, you’ll have to read his post. (as an aside, he is the only one examining the business side, but his post is not on TechMeme – let’s see if we can push it there
)
Speculation aside, some numbers: SharePoint has 80 million users while Atlassian Confluence has 4,100 customers – I don’t know how many users that translates to, but I’ve just written about SAP’s SDN/BPX communities which has about a million (!) users, and Confluence is a significant part of it. That said, Jeffrey said it right, David kisses Goliath in this deal.
There is no marketing agreement behind it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft’s huge reseller channel show interest in Confluence. And frankly, just removing the “we’re a SharePoint-shop” political obstacle in some major enterprise client is worth it alone.
Sour grapes? Competitor Socialtext announced their SharePoint integration a year ago, and CEO Ross Mayfield says SharePoint wiki was last year’s news. Well, I think Socialpoint, the Socialtext/SharePoint integration was last year’s news, this year’s news is Confluence.
Perhaps next year’s news will be which enterprise wiki vendor could translate their deals into real market gains. 
Update: here’s a video interview with CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes and President Jeffrey Walker on ScobleShow.
HOT! EXCLUSIVE! Here’s the real price Mike had to pay for this deal… just compare his looks above with this video. What’s next? A suit and tie?
Related posts: Read/WriteWeb, Computerworld, Don Dodge, Atlassian News, WebProNews, Between the Lines, Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, Irregular Enterprise, Radiowalker, elliptical , eWEEK.com, Socialwrite, Trends in the Living Networks, Rebelutionary.
Update (10/19): Intriguing thoughts on wiki plug-ins, KM Web-services and Enterprise SOA on – surprise, suprise! – the SAP Community Network
Tags: atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, enterprise wiki, microsoft, sharepoint, socialpoint, socialtext, wiki, wikis
Wiki: the Beauty & the Beast. Usability & Functionality (Event)
Bay Area, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Startups September 25th, 2007
Silicon Valley Web Builder will host a wiki-focused event tomorrow, Wednesday. While their first wiki event almost a year ago with JotSpot, Socialtext , Atlassian and WetPaint was more introductory, this time the focus will be on – surprise! – the contrast or harmony of Beauty- i.e. attractive UI, vs. the Beast – functional robustness.
The Moderator for tomorrow is Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo’s design guru who has authored a book on Web interface design principles titled “Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability” and is working on thee next one: “Web Form Design Best Practices”.
- Kevin Flaherty of Wetpaint
- Ryan Lukehart of BrainKeeper
- Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch
- Raju Vegesna of Zoho
- Joshua Wold of Atlassian
It’s definitely an interesting mix. Playing a bit with the metaphor, I’d say market leader Atlassian is known as the “beast”: whatever enterprise wiki functionality you can think of, their Confluence will likely have it.
Wetpaint got popular for the “beauty” – that’s why I called it the wiki-less wiki. It’s a most user-friendly self-publishing tool that allows anyone to create a site and transform it into an online community. Incidentally, the SV Web Builder site is built on Wetpaint.
Brainkeeper, a user-friendly enterprise wiki startup took me by surprise when they launched in January. Totally out of left field, they aim to be the beast like Confluence and the beauty like Wetpaint, with twists not seen in wikis, like workflow. I’m really looking forward to seeing how far they’ve got since launch.
“MindTouch is transforming the Wiki from the Web’s best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart. Their Deki Wiki Hayes release is perhaps the most extendable Wiki tool available today.” I had to steal that line from Read/WriteWeb, I couldn’t have said it any bettr – oh, and congrat’s on reaching the 100,000 user mark!
Zoho is not a pure-play wiki player. Their wiki is just a part of a productivity/collaboration suite, and it shows. Beauty? The UI needs improvement, but this is the only wiki with not just simple a WYSIWYG editor, but a full word processor that writes true html, not wiki syntax. Beast? I think the emphasis here will not be on the standalone product, but how well it integrates with other Zoho offerings, supporting a flow-oriented world that matches how we think.
It will no doubt be an interesting event, so please check out the site details, and remember, admission is free if you register online, but $10 at the door. See you tomorrow.
Related posts: Laughing Squid, Lunch 2.0, Functioning Form, Mindtouch, Brainkeeper, Wetpaint, Zoho blogs, Centernetworks.
Tags: atlassian, brainkeeper, confluence, deki wiki, design, mindtouch, silicon valley web builder, Social Networking, svwb, usabiility, wetpaint, wiki, wikis, zoho
Zoli Erdos
