After commenting on ThoughtFarmer’s post about being a hybrid wiki/intranet CMS, I started reading about Socialtext latest version 3 release. It has some interesting new hybrid features, which are demonstrated in this short video:
One of the new features is the “Customizable home pages that let each person decide where to focus their attention”. Is it me, while we know that the traditional portal and intranet CMS vendors have trying to become more like social media applications, but are the enterprise wikis now trying to become more like traditional information platforms? It worries me a little because there are so many other business applications offering portal like interfaces (but with varying degrees of success) and I just hope we don’t end up where we started!
UPDATE: Also worth reading is a more upbeat analysis from Susan.
I definately agree, when I first looked at what Nathan Wallace was doing with Confluence I thought this is more than a wiki...it's got blogs, you can stream content of all blogs on a page, it's got an expert locator, it's got jitter (twitter).
ReplyDeleteAnd like you say, same goes with SocialText, they have all become portals or the new CMS.
Even when you look at Google Sites, it's not called Google Wikis for a reason.
In Google Sites you can add a wikipage, but you can add other types of themed pages like blogs, tasks...so a wiki page is just one type of page. But then the other wiki aspect is the whole thing is a wiki website (or a build it yourself website).
I think there are 2 aspects to wikis, the pages and the website. For example you could have a wiki type website that enables you to add/delete/customise pages/modules, but it may not have HTML wikipages that you can edit. So is this still called a wiki?
People like one vendor solutions, and if Confluence, SocialText, and ThoughtFarmer can offer, blogs, RSS, micro-blogs, wikis, etc...in the one solution, then that's clever.
Awareness, Clearpsace are similar I guess, but they started out as communities rather than wikis, and what about Lotus Connections, they have an integrated component type approach.