You need a “Wiki champion”, not a “wiki bully” to lead the efforts by finding and using those specific instances where a wiki really is the best way to achieve a goal, and who leads people there by making their lives easier, not by berating them to use yet another tool they don’t want.

You need somebody who can do the gardening of the wiki, who can manage the chaos a little bit as the pages start to accumulate.

And somebody to check back with users to find out what’s working and what isn’t.

These might all be the same person but more likely it’s a small team: a technical person and a more user-focused person could probably wear all the hats.

Based on your experience with it, what kind (qty, quality) of human resources would you say this tool requires? The installed version, not the hosted.

I’m really excited for you guys that you have been able to get Massive out the door. You’re way up there at the high end of the market when you’re talking about those kinds of audience sizes. I have no doubt that your app will be solid there.

The Australia thing is probably no longer relevant. For many years, Australians were known for having little presence on the net because the pipe to Australia for the net in the early days was seriously under the necessary capacity. I’m sure that has all been fixed with the massive telco / optical build out of the 1995-2000s though so I was probably out of touch to make that comment.

I’m aware that your sales eclipse that of the other wiki vendors – and that rocks. Your focus on revenue and profitability is admirable and is a lesson many others in this current gold rush would do well to emulate. This is why I think you’ll be around for a while. “Good on ya” as they say in Oz.

I would also like to applaud the plug-in architecture that you’ve built – that was one of the selling points for our team when they looked at your software for sure. Having said that, many of the plug-ins really end up solving stuff that should be done by the app. Not being able to copy/paste Microsoft’s crappy HTML directly into some sort of parsing field at this stage of the game seems WAAAY overdue. The XMetal guys built some kick-ass tools for that over the past few years. Let me know if you want an intro. But then their XHTML editor would take another $1M to rebuild from scratch – it was fifteen years of development but could be rebuilt now in about 6 months. Text editors as you will learn are a sore point with me.

Regarding the move to hosting, you and I discussed this once before but I think my thinking has evolved in a different direction than it had at the time we last spoke. At that time, I was concerned that you were missing the bottom of the market and would lose them permanently as they jumped on the disruptive, cheaper, hosted platforms below you. A standard innovator’s dilemma – you have overshot the low-end who just want a quick, light-weight wiki with low barriers to entry.

And that’s still true. But the biggest gain I think from having software hosted vs. not is the ability to go from 6 month release cycles to “Flickr time” cycles of 15 minutes. The number of potential mutations of your software can be thousands of times more. The other critical piece of that is that on premise software generally isn’t instrumented to track attention data. Hosted software can be designed to both mutate quickly but equally important to track every single thing a person or group does in real time. That is the other half of the evolution cycle. Test, learn, adapt, test, learn adapt. With hosted software and an extreme focus on test, learn, adapt, a vendor can mutate their software from “it’s okay” to “this rocks and they keep coming up with stuff exactly when I want it!!!” I think that a lot of vendors will move from on-premise to hosted and will not pay attention to the attention data – they will consider it a business model and delivery change and will miss entirely that it is an enabler for radically fast product innovation. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on that.

Anyway, as noted before, I wish you and your team the best for 2007. I expect it will be a heck of an interesting year ahead for you!

Troy

Our big enterprise effort was the release of Confluence Massive this month which delivers clustering for infinite scalability. We did this because we were getting a lot of pressure from companies to roll out to huge user populations: IBM has 50K users on one Confluence intranet, and SAP’s Developer Network which uses Confluence has a 500K user data base. Also a number of universities including MIT intend to roll Confluence out to the entire student population.

Now that Massive is out, expect to see us concentrate on shorter release cycles again. UI matters, and I appreciate your critique.

Your take on Australians and hosting is intriguing. [I'm an American so not being defensive here]. The reason we concentrated on installed software, up until now, is most buyers of wikis have been IT people, and most companies have preferred this option, if you compare — I will humbly point out — our sales vs. other commercial wikis. Atlassian also built an open architecture and a plugin library that lets customers build on top of the wiki, which installed software fits.

None of this changes the need for us to offer hosting now. The wiki market is very much a business and an IT market now. Thanks for the analysis. — Jeffrey

I’ currently trying to start a blog on the subject of corporate wikis (WikiBC) and hence conducted some research on the topic. I think that 2 things are to be considered about your post :

First, hosted wiki solutions can evolve easily (I am a SocialText user, they just started their interface 2.0, far better than the first, and it only improved my situation : the only drawback is that I couldn’t accessed it for 4 hours) and should be evaluated on the basis of expected potential mutations rather than their present state only. Whatever the wiki you choose you will find features you either do not like or you miss. The best wiki company will be the one that address its consumer needs the soonest and this does not necessarily mean the most advanced one today.

Second, a successful wiki is not about features, it is about employees adoption and usage. Even with a basic structure, if you can convince people to use it by showing them what they can get out of it, it will work. The wiki offers a potentiality of knowledge sharing and structuration, of improved communication. Getting people to use it has far more to do with a good formation and motivation process than with the product itself (as long as it works).

Guillaume

George Kordonis,

Seattle, Wa

Check out Wikidot (http://www.wikidot.com) for free wikis with professianal features It does not have WYSIWYG but rather “aided” editing and so far is the only of the wikis to produce valid XHTML (check it with http://validator.w3.org)

Cheers – michal

I’m now also looking at Central Desktop and Confluence. Both of them seem to have interesting features as well. I must say I do find Confluence’s sandbox confusing.

I agree with Zoli….WetPaint has no business in this list.

I agree with Zoli….WetPaint has no business in this list.

What’s great about the “Web 2.0 model” is that you can forget the wasteful enterprise sales model – the technology sort of sells itself, by small user groups starting to use it, without IT “blessing”.. then it spreads, becomes viral, eventually the CIO gives in and blesses it to the entire corporation This bottom u p adaption by non-technical business users is what’s at stake by not offering hosted access. That says, Confluence is doing very well, financially beating the other two together… so who knows how much more they could do by offering both on-demand and on-premise.