This morning I attended the Socialtext webinar on wikis in organizations. These are my notes taken during the call.

Jessie argued that the question isn’t whether organizations “should” embrace a wiki, but “when”? Jessie quoted from Gartner, which estimated that up to half of organizations will have embraced wikis and blogs by 2009. She noted that she would be talking about wikis in general and their usage in organizations, not specifically the Socialtext offering. However, the Socialtext wiki is the one she’d be using (that’s fair).

How are organizations using wikis today?
1. Organizations are doing the internal Wikipedia approach.
2. Private spaces for project teams. Eg, a sales organization wants to develop a new proposal format, and 5-6 people use a private workspace to develop this. Eg 2, a workspace is created for each client engagement.
3. Marketing Department … web and print collateral projects, marketing campaign coordination, lead productivity reports, product launches
4. Sales … lead counts, partnership information, product positioning, product features, competitive intelligence

What are the benefits?
(a) project times are cut by 25%
(b) email is reduced by 30%
(c) create transparency and sharing of expertise as a by-product of work you already do
(d) foster a culture of trust and learning via social participation
(e) unleash the ideas trapped in email

Those are interesting numbers, especially the first one. I’d like to see more data backing up that claim.

Becoming an Idea Factory
Wikis mean that great ideas get popularized, and less good ideas get dropped and left behind.

Jessie used the term “wisdom of crowds”, but it’s important to recognize that the wisdom of crowds only works if (a) there are enough people, and (b) those people bring different perspectives to the issue at hand.

Capabilities that Users Demand
1. Ease of use … WYSIWYG editing and tagging
2. Drive adoption by integrating with email, providing mobile access, and giving offline access.
3. Various advanced features help, such as embedded HTML, RSS, searching, and integrated wikis and blogs.

Desktop Sharing Session
Jessie shared her screen, and the “JMD” demonstration wiki. Key points:
1. The wiki interface can be customized for each organization, eg, look-and-feel, graphics and logos, etc.
2. The front page of each Socialtext wiki workspace shows what’s new (what’s changed in recent days), and a personal watchlist of pages of particular interest to an individual. There’s also a list of workspaces that each individual is involved with (by invitation, with access control).
3. “Workflow” for approval of a document can handled by copying a page-in-production to another wiki, and then use the commenting functionality to say “approve” or “not approved”. When ready, the document can be published for external viewing. (Michael’s Thoughts: Very simple approach, but not very elegant or controllable. There needs to be more automation around this, such as a graphical wizard to enforce workflow policies on documents. That’s my view.)
4. Users can email documents and thoughts to a wiki. Jessie suggested that if a team is using a wiki for a group project, they could be asked to CC: the wiki on each piece of task-related information.
5. Socialtext allow users to tag documents in a wiki. When typing in tags, Socialtext uses a form of “type-ahead” to show what tags already exist based on what the user has started to type. Eg, if the user starts typing “au”, then a list of suggested tags will show up that includes those two letters. And it’s dynamic. Very nice.
6. Each workspace gives an RSS feed of the entire wiki, or alternatively the recent changes in the wiki. RSS is also available for specific searches … you type the search, and then subscribe to it for further updates as that search changes. RSS also works the other way … you can take an RSS feed from an external site and embed it into a wiki.
7. Socialtext delivers an offline capability, called “Socialtext Unplugged”. It permits users to take specific pages offline for editing, and then re-sync their changes with the live workspace when they re-connect. Specifically how conflicts were dealt with were not discussed.

Back to the Deck
A wiki can be deployed behind the firewall, or can be embraced as a hosted solution. In Socialtext’s case, they have behind-the-firewall appliances and software, as well as Socialtext.net for hosted wikis. The latter is what I use.

Socialtext offers integration with portals, Active Directory (for authentication and authorization), and Microsoft SharePoint.

Wikis can also handle structured data, such as spreadsheets. The new “SocialCalc” brings a wiki paradigm to spreadsheets, with full revision history on each cell.

Socialtext offered a special attendee offer related to the Socialtext behind-the-firewall appliance. But you’ll have to attend the next session on March the 13th to learn more (registration required). And you’ll have to meet their qualification tick-boxes.

Michael’s Thoughts
Nice overview by Jessie of what wikis are, and where they can be used. Also, I think she handled well the tradeoff between selling the idea of wikis in general and selling the value of Socialtext. And there’s definitely some nice functionality in what Socialtext offers.

As with other collaborative tools, I think she/they missed the key point toward making collaborative workspaces work. But I need to keep thinking and exploring that one before saying much more.