Quick Facts
CONFLUENCE 2.1
Requires: Sun JDK 1.4, J2EE 1.3 compatible server (included).
Price: $1,200 (25 users), $2,200 (50 users), $4,000 (500 users), $8,000 (unlimited users); 50 percent academic discount, free to non-profits and open-source developers; free personal version (2 users, no support).
AT A GLANCE REVIEW
(5s is best)
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Project Management Support:
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Altassian
www.altassian.com
Quick Facts
JOTSPOT 2.5
Requires: Standard Web browser.
Price: $9.95 per month (10 users, 100 pages), $24.95 per month (25 users, 300 pages), $69.95 per month (unlimited users, 1,000 pages), $199.95 per month (unlimited users, unlimited pages), free (five users, 20 pages); larger volume discounts available. Appliance version starts at $6,995 annually.
AT A GLANCE REVIEW
(5s is best)
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Jotspot
Exploiting networks, especially the Internet, for team communication and coordination is nothing new. Microsoft Project and other project management stalwarts—Niku, Primavera and Welcom—long ago added network server versions and Web portals to their product lines. Then along came the peer-to-peer groupware and online project management sites.
Get ready for the new wave. Blogs, those ubiquitous electronic soapboxes, and an intriguing variant called wikis are infiltrating the project management world.
KWIKI HISTORY
What's a wiki? Technically, it's a bunch of Web pages that can be edited by a group. (The technology's inventor took the name from a Hawaiian shuttle bus called the Wiki-Wiki, which translates to very quick.) The best known wiki is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute.
Wikis are deceptively plain-looking, often sporting a few columns, headings and rarely any imagery, save for the occasional icon. Fundamentally, they are text pages with hyperlinks to other text pages and external files—say, a Microsoft Project schedule, Excel spreadsheet or task list. It's this simplicity that makes wikis a blank slate. Wikis can transform into serious collaboration tools when augmented with file attachments, macros, directory-based multi-level security and RSS readers to automatically inform users of changes.
A wiki is a group document, while most blogs are published by an individual and largely closed to modification. The two can be combined to great effect, though. For example, a team manager can use a page to update everyone on the latest news and project status, and bulleted items in a blog can each link to a separate wiki.
Wikis are most popular among software programmers who can easily set them up to share bug reports and collaborate on development projects. Now, wikis are moving out of IT and into the project management mainstream. Still, most are free products and probably only suited for companies with solid development departments. Don't mistake any of these for specialized project-scheduling and cost-estimating tools.
Last fall, I tested what industry observers say are the very first three commercial wikis geared to business use.
CONFLUENCE
Although it started life as a free tool for programming teams, Confluence was planned for commercialization by its maker, Atlassian. It's only available as a Java-based program that requires a complicated, piecemeal installation on either a server or each user's desktop machine. This is old hat to programmers, but a challenge for many end-users. I tried a demo version that runs on Atlassian's computers, accessing it over the Internet from my Web browser. The company had planned to add a proper installation utility, while making the hosted version commercially available, but has yet to do so. Since my test run, it has added a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) page editor, a welcome improvement from the cumbersome Web-standard HTML, which will be over the heads of most nontechnical users.
Confluence lets you archive all your e-mail in searchable wiki pages, and CC or auto-forward it to a Post Office Protocol mailbox. Pages can be organized into a hierarchical tree, and you can add comments to a page without formally editing it. Confluence is also highly customizable; it comes with numerous macros and plugins, and its source code is accessible for programming to commercial users.
Quick Facts
SOCIALTEXT.NET 1.9
Requires: Standard Web browser.
Price: $95 per month (19 users, including maintenance), $1,995 per month (250 to 400 users), $9,995 (500 to 50,000 users), free (five users or open-source projects).
AT A GLANCE REVIEW
(5s is best)
Ease of Use:
Feature Richness:
Project Management Support:
Performance:
Overall Value:
Socialtext Inc.
www.socialtext.com
European investment firm Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein uses a Socialtext wiki to improve productivity and reduce e-mail overload.
JOTSPOT
Balancing ease of use, built-in features and programmability, JotSpot is the wiki I can most imagine using for the long-term. In some ways, it's more of a wiki-based, open-source development platform than an application. It even ships with a gallery of applications, including a calendar and project scheduler. A forms feature simplifies data entry on wiki pages, but more than that, serves as a programming interface reminiscent of Microsoft's Visual product line.
JotSpot has the fastest hyperlink-creation mechanism. Simply type a “wiki-word”—initial capital letters run together—and it turns into a link. Clicking on the link opens a new page, or you can start one from the create page button. The page-editing interface is similar to that found in Word, and there's a feature that tracks every revision made to a page. Since my test run, the company has redesigned the user interface to make it simpler and easy to read. The company says that more operations, such as adding comments and uploading files, now happen “inline” instead of loading a new page—one of the few things I disliked in my test run.
SOCIALTEXT.NET
Debuting way back in 2002, Socialtext.net is the most mature of the three. It boasts a deceptively plain user interface that serves as a communication console to a range of channels, including e-mail, Web services and RSS. There's also instant messaging with “presence integration” that tells you who is currently reachable from the wiki. Socialtext claims its wiki can accelerate project cycles up to 25 percent by fostering team communication.
Socialtext.net's WYSIWYG editor does not quite match up to JotSpot's—it still requires some embedded text markup. Socialtext.net's Microsoft Word-like editor has been upgraded to true WYSIWYG quality, making it comparable to JotSpot's, while advanced mode provides more control if you're comfortable inserting programming codes directly into the text. It seemed easier in Socialtext to create a dashboard-like master view of a project, which is why I rate this product the strongest in project-management support.
AND THE WIKI WINNER IS…
As programs run from Web browsers on a variety of computers, these hosted applications can't really be tested for speed. The ratings instead reflect a program's reliability, bugginess, and efficiency of design and operation for the version available during the test period.
I slightly prefer JotSpot because it's the easiest to use and navigate, a paramount consideration with wikis, whose raison d'etre is their day-to-day usability and mass appeal. At the same time, JotSpot has the most features, notably its built-in applications and development tools. Socialtext is somewhat less feature-rich but simpler in design. Confluence is weakest on both counts, and its close ties to the developer community are both an asset and a liability. As new features are added, it has the potential to grow into a groupware platform—if installation and maintenance are simplified in future versions.
David E. Essex is a freelance journalist specializing in IT.
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