It's been quite a month for the wiki community. A kind of coming of age. SystemOne came out of the shadows, as did Itensil. SocialText officially released its 2.0 version and now it has a version that integrates with Microsoft's Sharepoint. Then to crown it all, Google went and bought JotSpot.
SystemOne and Itensil are wikis that hope to be better known for their discovery and workflow respectively. Both are fundamentally wikis but each has been extended in extremely useful ways. SystemOne shows you all the documents which relate to what you're working on at any moment. Itensil lets you embed your wiki work inside permanent or ad hoc workflow processes.
By moving to Google, JotSpot appears to have consolidated its position in the consumer space. Some of its more corporate clients are seriously considering a move to Socialtext or Atlassian's Confluence. Apparently, the idea of Google hosting company information does not appeal. They would prefer, it seems, to pay their supplier to host their wiki and its data. Some will take the open source, appliance or self-install route with Socialtext. The same, or similar, seems to apply to Atlassian, although it no longer has an appliance.
Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google Enterprise, was quick to blog, "We're excited about what that could mean for our enterprise customers." But that does rather read as if it came straight out of the PR101 handbook.
For IWR readers the most interesting aspect of all these recent developments is that the wiki now appears to be emerging as a genuine, respectable, collaboration tool. And Socialtext's Sharepoint version, Socialpoint, makes a huge amount of sense commercially because of the massive grip Microsoft still has within organisations.
I agree that Google adopting the Jot wiki as a major component of their Office 2.0 family, along with the publicity, will do a lot to get the wiki topic on to the mainstream business radar. It's a shame that SocialText's SharePoint announcement was rather lost in the mix. With the number of blue chip enterprise customers of SocialText, Confluence, Jot and the others it's a shame there aren't more good case studies available to help get the concept adopted even further.
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