October 6th, 2004
Enterprise wikis getting interesting
Ross Mayfield of SocialText has been pioneering and evangelizing the use of wikis for enterprise applications. Now he has some company. Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer launched their new company, called JotSpot, at the Web 2.0 conference this morning. JotSpot is based on wiki technology, which lowers the barriers to creating Web-based collaborative applications. JotSpot extends the concept. "Wikis run out of steam in that they don’t allow you to add structure or build apps," Kraus said. "On the surface, JotSpot looks like Wiki and you can use as a wiki, but it allows you to start with unstructured data and add structure incrementally." For example, JotSpot lets users create forms, add external feeds and integrate with applications like salesforce.com.
SocialText, which has around 50 enterprise customers, is also adding in features to provide more structure and extensibility to wikis. "Yesterday we demoed WYSIWYG, integration of an RSS feed to populate a page (with a Technorati plugin) and something really new–Fotowiki," Mayfield said.
Like blogging software, wikis provide a low-cost, high ease-of-use way to leverage the Web. This bottoms-up approach to building simpler enteprise software is going to have real impact over time, just as companies like saleforce.com, Netsuite, Exult and RightNow are getting traction with mainstream enterprise applications. SocialText and JotSpot are first generation products, but the technology will evolve rapidly.
Mayfield, however, warns about the slippery slope of adding more functionality to the wiki platform: "Adding structure can quickly lead to Lotus Notes and traditional failings of enterprise software that impose complexity and constraints upon users — so they don’t use them. The real test isn’t what you code, but how it serves users and communities."
