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Wikis are Not Knowledge Management Tools

No, this is not an anti-wiki pitch, that would be highly unlikely coming from me. But I am continually amazed how we tend to focus on features while missing the people factor. Knowledge Management is a prime example. KM projects typically do not fail due to software issues, but for human reasons: lack of input, or GIGO. Yet here’s an excerpt from a white paper by enterprise wiki vendor MindTouch::

Wikis provide a flexible alternative to the rigidity of conventional

knowledge management software.

Why wikis work for knowledge management

Based on the features described above, wikis are a powerful replacement for conventional

knowledge management software, because they make knowledge easier to

capture, find and consume:

a. Capturing information: The information is there. Somewhere. Maybe on

a PC, maybe in a file attached to an email, maybe in someone’s head

undocumented. With a wiki, all documents are stored in one central

repository, and files are uploaded rather than attached to emails. Therefore

information is more likely to be captured, stored and made available for reuse.

b. Finding information: When a user has to search a network file server,

he or she must know exactly where to look. A wiki lets a user search

contextually. In addition, because the structure is not required to be linear—

as with KM software—cross-linking of pages helps users not only find

information, but find relevant information.

c. Consuming information: In addition to finding information more easily with

a wiki, a user finds that information in context, meaning the information

is in a location that gives the user some background and perspective relative

to the data. That enables the user to more quickly comprehend the meaning,

significance and relevance of that piece of information. “

All of the above is true – yet it misses the Big Picture. The real story is not about a better tool, but being able to work differently. When wikis are truly embraced in the enterprise, they don’t just make KM easier; they put it out of it’s misery. Yes, that’s right, the wiki is the end of Knowledge Management as we know it: the after-the-fact collection, organization and redistribution of knowledge objects.

The wiki becomes the primary platform to conduct work, the fabric of everyday business, where people create, collaborate, and in the process capture information. While not a Knowledge Management tool, the wiki resolves the KM-problem as a by-product.

Update (6/15/08): Now we have pretty good terms to describe the above, instead of my clumsy explanation. See the discussion on In-the-Flow and Above-the-Flow wikis by Michael Idinopulos and Ross Mayfield.

Ross Mayfield talks about similar ideas in Manage Knowledgement (MK):

“Turns out, users resisted and the algorithms didn’t match reality. With MK, through blogs and wikis, the principle activity is sharing, driven by social incentives. Contribution is simple and unstructured, isn’t a side activity and there is permission to participate. Intelligence is provided by participants, both through the act of sharing and simply leaving behind breadcrumbs of attention.”

Update (5/1): What Happened to Knowledge Management? – by Stewart Mader

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Read/Write Intranet 2007

Rod Boothby is running a Read/Write Intranet Idol – it’s a poll I invite you to participate in, so I am attaching it at the bottom. But first, it gives me a chance to share some of my (wiki)-thoughts.

The list is a mix of industry behemoths (Microsoft, IBM Lotus), emerging but established brands (Atlassian‘s Confluence, Socialtext, WordPress), relatively known startups and quite a few obscure names. The latter probably not by pure chance: both Rod and I are on the Selection Committee for the next Under the Radar Conference on Office 2.0, and scouting for candidates we have made quite a few new discoveries, including some of these “obscure” names, that likely won’t remain obscure for long.

Perhaps the biggest “discovery” for me was Brainkeeper, a user-friendly enterprise wiki startup that officially launches today. Totally out of left field, they aim to be like market-leader Confluence in functionality yet have a friendly UI like Wetpaint. Oh, and add niceties like Workflow (Itensil?) and an API. Like I said before sometimes it pays to *not* be first on the market …

It was really interesting to watch the poll dynamics change yesterday and this morning. First, with only a handful votes cast unknown little Brainkeeper was leading the chart. Another leader was Koral, a content collaboration startup I’ve been planning to write about way too long now (until I pull my act together, see two reviews by Ismael and John Wilson). What’s content collaboration? It’s content management without the pain of “management”. As much as I am a fan of wikis, not all companies will embrace them: Koral helps those who mostly work with desktop documents (MS Office) share, update, collaborate painlessly.

Back to the poll: as more voters came in, predictably the “brand names” strengthened their position and the “obscure” ones fell somewhat behind. Still with 117 votes cast, I believe it’s mostly InnovationCreators’s primary reader-base, where Microsoft Sharepoint or Lotus Notes Blogsphere are not exactly popular. Like it or not those products will make a killing on the corporate market. So “brand name” here means the likes of Confluence by Atlassian, Socialtext, WordPress, Movable Type…etc.

Confluence’s #1 position on the list reflects it’s real-life market position: absolute leader in market share, revenue, functionality. Of course to maintain that position they can’t just sit on their laurels and they know that. At a really productive meeting with the San Francisco team recently we discussed their development plans, most of which I cannot share for now. However, I am happy to share that in the not-so-distant future Confluence will offer a hosted version – something I’ve repeatedly asked for:-).

As for competitor Socialtext, they revamped the product a few months ago: while I was fairly critical of some of the functional misses, the single biggest improvement was the UI: they went from an outright ugly product to a pleasant-looking, clean, friendly one. In fact this, along with other players (JotSpot, Wetpaint, Zoho, Brainkeeper) has turned the table: formerly good-looking Confluence now feels a bit … well, 2005-ish (?) Still the best, but somewhat boring. They are keenly aware of this and improving the UI is one of Atlassian’s key priorities.

JotSpot is in hibernation in the meantime, although TechCrunch speculates it may open up soon. Zoho is a newcomer to the wiki space, but not one to underestimate: they may just leapfrog all other players when they tightly integrate their full Suite (Write, Show, Sheet, Create) thus creating a truly powerful read/write/collaborate platform online.

Last, but not least two smaller wiki-players from the list: Itensil combines workflow with a wiki (now, religious wiki-fans deny the need for any structure or workflow, which is probably OK for a small group, but workflow is the way large corporations work), and System One combines a wiki with relevant enterprise search.

Without further ado (wasn’t this enough?) here’s the poll, please cast your vote:

You can click “view results” after you cast your vote, then “Complete results” to se more stats on the Zoho Polls site. Once there, click the “Rating” header to sort the list in ranking order – right now, with 117 votes cast Confluence is #1 with an average of 3.54, closely followed by Brainkeeper’s 3.50.

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Wetpaint Attracts More Funding

(Updated)

Wetpaint, the “wiki-less wiki” received a $9.5 million Series B round in addition to its $5.25 million Series A in October 2005.

TechCrunch compares it to other wikis, especially key competitor Wikia:

“Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint.”

I’d take this one step further: Wetpaint isn’t really just a wiki, it’s a wiki – blog – forum hybrid. Even novice users can just happily type away and create attractive pages with photos, videos, tagging …etc. without the usual learning curve. These pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive – in fact that’s what it’s all about: online community creation.

Last August I issued a challenge to find another wiki just as easy to use with a comparably rich feature-set – the challenge still stands.

My only concern is that they appear to burn money faster than the other wiki-companies – but I guess if the investors are not worried, it’s really not my business

smile_wink (And in fairness they have a different business model)

Update (1/9): VentureBeat comments:

“With Jotspot gone for now (presumably, Google will relaunch it in some fashion), and players like Socialtext increasingly focused on selling its wiki software to company users, Wetpaint is among the more convenient Wiki softwares for individual projects.”

As much as I like Wetpaint, I have to disagree. I’ve never considered it a project-oriented collaboration tool. It’s clearly geared towards community creation, and like I’ve hinted above, for that purpose it’s the friendliest platform avaialable today. Business -even small projects – requires a few additional features like document handling (attachments, version control..etc), email integration ..etc.

JotSpot was quite good for that, too bad it’s gone. Socialtext used to be quite ugly, but the new UI is quite nice – it misses a few features though. The new kid on the block is Zoho’s Wiki , (bias alert: I’m and advisor to Zoho) with quite a few features for an initial beta release. It already supports embedding documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos..etc, and with improved integration to the full Zoho suite later this year it will be a killer combination.

Update (5/13/08):  TechCrunch article on Wetpaint’s traction.

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ProfileLinker – Just the Opposite of What I Need

ProfileLinker is a new service profiled on TechCrunch today:

“ProfileLinker wants to aggregate your social networking experience….You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.”

I am probably not the right target customer for ProfileLinker, I admit I don’t even have a MySpace of Facebook profile.  But I do have one on LinkedIn, and was invited to several networks whose function I’d find useful, except that I won’t take the time to create a profile from scratch again and again.  What I (and I suspect most networkers) badly need is a way to leverage the already existing profile and network (friends) information on other sites – probably by using a “central depository” of such information.

Who cares about ProfileLinker, give me ProfileCentral!

 

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Zoho Adds Wiki to Online Suite – It’s All Coming Together

It’s nice to get your dream fulfilled fast.  Writing about Socialtext 2.0 in October I wrote:  “My ‘dream setup‘ for corporate collaboration: a wiki with an integrated Office 2.0 Suite.”

A little later in my post on the JotSpot/Google deal I specifically called for my friends at Zoho (I’m an advisor to the company)  “to make their move soon: they either need to come up with their own wiki, or team up with a wiki company…So far Zoho is ahead of Google in Office 2.0, if they want to maintain that leadership, they will need a wiki one way or another.”

I did not have to wait long, Zoho Wiki is here, announced simultaneously on TechCrunch and the Zoho Blog

This product is perhaps the first showcase of how Zoho’s long term product strategy will play out.  To begin with, if you are a registered user for some of Zoho’s other products, your single sign-on automatically gives you access to the Wiki.  (For now you can create 3 wikis, but I don’t expect this restriction to last long.)

While most wikis I know of started their life without  WYSIWYG editing – yes, you had to write ugly markup language – Zoho Wiki shares the codebase of Zoho Writer, so right at the start you have all the bells and whistles of the popular editor, including formatting options, special characters, emoticons, inserting tables and a spell checker, amongst others.  As for appearance, there are 5 themes to select from, should you not like the default one.

A wiki is all about linking: Zoho supports multiple options of creating new pages and linking to them:

  1. there is a large “create new page” button displayed consistently on all pages
  2. you can use the link icon from the editor and pick wiki pages, email addresses or external URLs.
  3. you can just type a WikiWord (also known as CamelCase) to create a page and link to it. (LinkAsYouThink)

#1 above is normally followed by creating links to the new page, but my personal preference is either #2 or #3, both of which create a “shell”, i.e. a link to a not-yet-existing page, that you can click on to actually create/edit the new page – this is way you can be sure you won’t end up with orphan pages. (I wrote more extensively about the orphan problem here)

Perhaps the most distinctive feature is how you can embed objects from other Zoho and 3rd-party applications: spreadsheets, graphs, presentations, forms, videos, slideshows…etc.  The screen-shot below comes from my test wiki, where I used a chart originally plotted in Zoho Sheet, using data coming from Zoho Polls, and originally published on my blog.

Pre-Google JotSpot became known as the “application wiki” for including a few pre-defined forms; think of the possibilities when you can use the full power of Zoho Creator to create forms/applications and embed them in your wiki.   Of course whichever application the data is updated in, it will be reflected in all other apps, typical Zoho-style.

For non-Zoho apps, see these two examples: a Youtube video and a Bubbleshare slideshow embedded in a Zoho wiki.

As for permissioning, both read and edit access can be independently set to either private / everyone or group; group members then can be managed individually.  What I would like to see in the future is the ability to centrally manage “groups” across all Zoho apps: for example set up a group in Virtual Office, where all my contacts are, then just refer to the group by name to share spreadsheets, wikis, presentations..etc.

And talk about wishlist, since I was recently fairly critical about SocialText 2.0, I have to be fair and state that I am missing some of the same features here, too: inbound links (backlinks), breadcrumbs to ease navigation, nested comments, improved history, and the ability to email to wiki pages.  The Zoho team reassured me that these are planned for future updates.

Notably absent is attachment handling and versioning, a standard feature in better business wikis, yet I don’t consider it an omission, rather good strategy. Why?  Document management/versioning in wikis solves a critical problem, but does so on the basis on yesterday’s (OK, today’s ) technology.  Even with proper versioning one has to download documents, locally update them, then upload them back up to the wiki. 

That’s a lot of work, and Zoho has a an easier, more streamlined  approach to do it all online. Not only they integrate Writer, Sheet and Show to the wiki, but have also provided tools to easily access documents originated by Word, Excel, Powerpoint online.

The current integration is still somewhat clumsy (but working): you invoke the applications separately, save your work, and either link to the document’s URL from within the wiki, or embed it by using the “insert html” icon.   What I’d like to see eventually:

  • Easy access to invoke to editor / sheet /show ..etc applications from inside a wiki page – perhaps a colored area on the sidebar
  • Smart linking: link button would bring up list of not just wiki pages but all my Sheet, Writer ..etc files
  • Single button embedding without having to copy/paste html code
  • Last but not least, text search not only of wiki pages but all my data across all Zoho applications.

Considering Zoho’s breakneck speed of product releases, I am quite optimistic that we don’t have to wait long.  It’s all coming together – in 2007.

smile_regular

 

Related posts:

 

 

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Google’s Unfair Advantage

(Updated)
Google’s Adwords is a fair system – with enough money you can outbid anyone and get top position … or .. can you?

Joe Kraus’s last blog post, It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur has become a much -quoted classic.  Part of his argument is how Search Engine Marketing changed everything, how one can now reach millions of small customers just buy buying the right keywords. Following this strategy a lot of startups spend most of their marketing budget to one company: Google.

Online collaboration company  Central Desktop followed the same path: frugal start and steady growth to profitability simply by having a solid good product and focused Adwords-based marketing. (They have  a really good integrated suite that I warmly recommend to small businesses as well as ad-hoc groups in need of  collaborative editing, groups, calendar, wiki, project management, tasks ..etc.)

It wasn’t until one of Central Desktop’s competitors, Joe Kraus’s very own JotSpot got acquired by Google that CEO Isaac Garcia started to investigate how Google plays its system against their own customers.

“You see, I’m not afraid of competing with Google – but I *AM* afraid of AdWords. Here is why……….
Google Cheats
Google holds the top advertisement (Adword) slot for the following key words:
intranet, spreadsheet, documents, calendar, word processor, email, video, instant messenger, blog, photo sharing, online groups, maps, start page, restaurants, dining, and books (somehow Amazon has managed to appear in the #1 ad slot for ‘books’).
For
spreadsheet, blog and video, in addition to squatting the premium ad position, Google Products also dominate three of the first four search results.
In such cases, Google Product Links and Ads can account for up to 25% of your viewable screen resolution – 30-40% for lower screen resolutions – almost guarantying that users will click on a Google Product over any other search results, sponsored links or text ads.
What this tells me is if you are trying to advertise a product that is competitive to Google, then you’ll never be able to receive the Top Ad Position, no matter how much money you bid and spend.

How successful do you think *your* ad buys would be if your competitor trumped your position no matter how high you bid your key words? “

His three questions to Google:

“1. How much does Google pay *itself* to claim the top ad position for searches relevant to its own products?
2. Does Google hold itself to the same minimum CTR thresholds for Ads placed?
(In case you aren’t aware – Google recently changed its Landing Page criteria; increasing keyword buys to $5.00, $10.00, $15.00+ for companies who’s Ads were not meeting a minimum (unknown) CTR.)
3. What alterations does Google make to its search algorithm to guarantee top rank for search results relevant to its own products?”

I think Isaac hit on something really big here:

“In the beginning, AdWords was hailed as the revolutionary platform that enabled small start-ups, mom and pop stores and businesses all around the world to ‘compete fairly in an open market bid system.’ It was written that “small businesses can now compete evenly with big business – it levels the playing field.””

Yes, it levels the playing field – as long as Google itself has no interest in your particular field.  So if you’re a small business owner, startup entrepreneur, how safe are you?  Today you don’t compete with Google, but considering Google’s appetite for acquisitions chances are tomorrow you will.  Is Google abusing its monopoly *against* you?

Update (11/8): The Inside Adwords blog responds:

“…our ads are created and managed under the exact same guidelines,principles, practices and algorithms as the ads of any other advertiser. Likewise, we use the very same tools and account interface. As does any advertiser, we aim to give our campaigns a budget which is in line with their value to us in terms of the increased traffic we might see. We actively monitor and manage the success of our ads by adjusting ad copy, keywords, bids, and so forth in the same way any advertiser who is concerned with their account performance would. That said, there are no special buttons to push or levers to pull that give our internal account managers special treatment or leverage.

Well, if I want to absolutely win a $10 item on eBay, I may auto-bid generously… $12, $15?   I certainly won’t bid $100.  Not that the price would reach $100, but eBay’s system will keep me in the winning position against all other bidders, who in a crazy bidding frenzy might drive my price up to .. $20? $30?  And, this being real money, I’d have to pay “too much”, above the value of the item.  Of course, if eBay as a company was bidding against me, they could afford that $100, or even $1000 bid – after all, it’s only “funny money”, just like Google bidding for Adwords.
Or, as ZDNet puts it:

“A Google AdWords self-promotion at Google.com, however, IS unique in a key way; The house is playing against the paying players.”

Update (11/8): Nick Carr’s When the auctioneer bids is a must-read.

Update (12/20): “Google recently emphasized they need to pay the same budgets as everyone else to advertise on Google using AdWords. What they might not have told us is that Google might simply not use AdWords in the first place… and instead, display a graphical “tip” Onebox on top of the organic results.”  Full story on Google Blogoscoped.

Update (7/7/2008)Ross Mayfield pondering on why he always gets outbid by Google.

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Web Office Embracing MS Office While Microsoft Is NOT

Perfect timing: I’m reading Richard MacManus’s post on Web Office APIs – Embracing and Extending Microsoft Office on the very same day we find out Microsoft isn’t embracing it’s own products.  

I guess Derek is right asking: Time to drop Microsoft Office?.   Especially when you can work on Microsoft files without Microsoft products.

Update (12/6):  Fred Wilson’s New Year Resolution: I am going to remove Microsoft from my life in 2007.

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Atlassian Founders Become Australian Entrepreneur of the Year

My first thought was deja vu… I myself reported on Mike and Scott winning the E&Y Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award a few months ago. Then it hit me; this is not the *young* category; Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar won the real thing, Ernst & Young’s Australian Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Now, if you first win the *young* category, then a few months later the *adult* one (not *that* way… ) does it mean you grew up quickly and are no longer young?smile_tongue

Joke apart, congrat’s to Mike and Scott, in fact the entire Atlassian team. They’ve built a remarkable company… when I first met them in the spring, they had about 50 employees, now it’s 70+, serving 5,000 customers in 65 countries. Their first hit was Jira, an issue management system, the second product, Confluence became the market leading enterprise wiki. Of course there are a number of ways to measure leadership, one being a feature-by-feature comparison, but at the end of the day, customers vote with their dollars, and Atlassian outsells their competition lumped together (including pre-Google JotSpot, amongst others).

Here’s a short video from the award ceremony.

Successful millionaires or not (Atlassian is self-funded), these guys remain humble and likeable; just read Mike’s post here. Oh, as for the likeable part, they hosted the Enterprise Irregulars, a few analysts and their own competitors to dinner, and did NOT use the opportunity to pitch us smile_shades

All that said, I have to warn anyone thinking of joining them … they are a dangerous bunch. smile_wink


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Zoho Releases MS Office Plug-ins, API’s and Desktopized Web Apps

Zoho releases product updates more or less weekly, and I don’t normally write them – frankly, I can’t keep track. (I do know, however, that Zoho Sheet that was just a cute but limited editor when I first looked at it is by now way beyond my average spreadsheet needs.)

Today’s announcements, however, fit the theme I laid out  in the previous post about Microsoft Office, specifically about getting released from Microsoft-prison. They way to get there is to be able to easily work with Microsoft documents (spreadsheet, presentation) formats without the need for bloated and overpriced MS software.

Directly opening/writing to MS formats was the obvious starting point; in the previous post I mentioned Zoho Quickread, a plug-in that allows opening of any MS Office files directly from the browser (IE, FF) without first importing/converting them. 

Today Zoho adds plug-ins for MS Office, which allows users to save their work online to Zoho directly from within Microsoft Word and Excel:

By the same token Zoho documents and spreadsheets can be opened directly in MS Office:

 

The first version of Zoho’s open APIs are also released today. 3rd party applications can now easily be integrated with the Zoho Suite. A good example is when online storage  services (OmniDrive, Box.net …etc.) open the documents directly in Zoho and even save them back to their own storage system using the APIs. 

Desktopize ( I kind of liked the previous name, Bubbles, as long as it’ wasn’t referring to Bubble 2.0 smile_tongue) is a good example for productive partnerships.   When Desktopize is installed, it creates Zoho icons on the desktop, allows users to click on them and work in Zoho without the browser as if it was a desktop application, close the window and have it minimized to the systray:

The pic above shows me editing this very article in the desktopized version of Zoho Writer, the Zoho icons in the lower left corner, and the Zoho writer icon in the systray.  Desktopize also allows drag-and-drop uploading from your files directly to Zoho Apps.

These are just one day’s worth of Zoho updates; to keep abreast, check out the Zoho Blogs.

Related posts:

TechCrunch

VentureBeat,

CyberNet Technology News, Digital Inspiration, The CIO Weblog

(disclaimer: I’m an advisor to Zoho)

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The Wikipedia Enterprise 2.0 Debate – Epilogue

The heated debate over the fate of the Enterprise 2.0 entry in Wikipedia ended in a compromise – it would stay under Enterprise Social Software. Back than I said the debate was largely irrelevant:

Enterprise 2.0 as a term my be relatively knew, but it’s not some theoretical concept a bored professor is trying to sell the world. It’s a disruptive change, a confluence of technological, social and business changes in how corporations conduct business using new IT tools. No Wikipedia gatekeepers can prevent this seismic shift. Let’s move on, do our work, and in less than 6 months Enterprise 2.0 will find its way back to Wikipedia.

Enterprise 2.0 Panel: Prof. Andy McAfee, Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalimi, Zoli Erdos, Rod BoothbyNot in 6 months, but in 3 a lot has changed and the term is gaining de facto acceptance. Case studies on Enterprise 2.0 penetration, panel discussions, analyst writeups, (thanks, Susan, for spotting it), and now a full-blown conference. CMP Technology announced the renaming of the Collaborative Technologies Conference to ‘Enterprise 2.0 Conference’. If this is not full vindication of Enterprise 2.0, then I don’t know what is (well, actually, I do – more penetration into business day by day…). On a sidenote, it’s worth observing how as the term becomes “fashionable”, new players claim ownership. The current Wikipedia entry barely resembles to the original, Harvard Prof. Andy McAfee is mentioned in a footnote only, and the most prominent entry is about a US Service Mark filed on May 25, 2006 by Alvin K Chang. I have no clue if he is related to CMP Media, or just the opposite, he tried to prevent assimilation by them (for good reason), all I know is that if “Enterprise 2.0” can be “owned” by anyone, it should be Prof. McAfee. Of course, knowing Andy I think he cares more about practical adoption in business then about turf-wars. smile_wink

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