Palo Alto based Jot is in the process of rolling out Jotspot 2.0, a significant upgrade to their hosted wiki solution.
We met with CEO Joe Kraus last week to demo the new product (and to discuss the Yahoo acquisition rumors from May, which were flatly denied).
Jotspot 2.0 takes the existing, mostly unstructured Jotspot wiki application and adds Office like functionality. The result is a wiki that allows users to add structured pages like calendars, spreadsheets, file repositories, documents, and photo galleries. Pricing for the service remains unchanged, with a free version and premium options ranging up to $200/month based on users, pages and storage.
With these changes it is our opinion that Jotspot is the best business-facing hosted wiki available. Jeremy Zawodny likes it too, but thinks they would be more successful if they stopped calling it a wiki.
Jotspot is also beta testing a non-hosted version of its wiki that is installed on a user’s server.
TechCrunch posts on Jotspot are here.
This is a very interesting solution with a sensible revenue model.
At the same time, it remains resolutely ‘internet SME’ in its focus. When you say “enterprise-facing”, I know what you mean, but I think you deeply underestimate their (a) need for this sort of solution (b) distrust of web apps without a long heritage and (c) inability to handle anything remotely techy, like any wicki.
Glad to hear that we’re the best enterprise-facing hosted wiki. For all y’all bloggers who love Jot, check out our affiliate program at http://affiliates.jot.com
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Now that’s what I call a revenue model!
ermmm… isn’t that a bit payperpost?
Thanks for the post, I always try and keep up with companies that I have featured. I did an interview with Jotspot co-founder, Joe Kraus a while ago. He had some very interesting things to say about the differences in running an internet company pre-bust and now.
http://www.npos...?intID=INT00123
That’s a great interview, Nathan. You did a really good job of drawing out the benefits of wikis within business. And it confirms my suspicions that this is an SME bid.
I’m trying this out here at work.. but keep getting errors with the calendar.
I also edited my Global links, and that messed the entire wiki up..
I like the service a lot so far, I’m hoping these errors are just from how busy the server is.
Dear Cody,
Thank you for giving JotSpot a test drive. Sorry to hear you received an error. I am JotSpot’s Director of Customer Support and I am more than willing to help. Send me email at jim at jot dot com with the name of your JotSpot account and I will take a look.
Sincerely,
Jim Haljun
The other ‘non-wiki’ player in the space is http://www.centraldesktop.com. Our firm started it using Central Desktop after getting lost in the complicated nature of Jot.
The new interface looks much better than I remember it from six months ago. Good job Jot.
Alas, we are hooked on Central Desktop now and feel that they have an easier interface and more powerful solution.
I think this could be a great tool to use for online collaboration and sharing of documents and files.
I’ve just created a Jotspot site for my community group to try it out. I love it’s functionality but can’t do what I need to be able to do in 10 pages, and I want a logo. See my post about it here http://jodiem.wordpress.com.
I love the concept of JotSpot and think that these product changes are definitely a step in the right direction. However, the problem with their application (at least the free version that I use) is twofold: 1) the WYSIWYG editing tool sucks…it’s moody, sometimes it does what you want it to do, sometimes it reformats your text as it solely wishes; if you have a long page and you’re trying to edit the bottom of the page, forget it, you’ll be trying to get the right formatting for ages, and 2) it’s slow. I am hoping those points are improved in the new design.
Hi Daniele,
We have a brand new WYSIWYG editor in the new JotSpot and I think you’ll like it a lot. It loads almost instantly and is a lot smoother to use. Also our toolbar now floats down with you when you scroll down to the bottom of a long page, which is handy. Sign up for a free trial account and try it!
(for a full list of editor improvements we’ve done lately, see the Wiki release notes: http://help.jot...ki/ReleaseNotes)
i’ve been using jotspot for over a month now, and i don’t know how to get the upgrade b/c I use jotspot hosting… i’m not sure what i should be replacing with what and if it will make my system unstable….
“Jotspot is also beta testing a non-hosted version of its wiki that is installed on a user’s server.”
When is the expected release date for this? Does anybody know?
We’ve been using Jotspot for a long time, and despite the wacky formatting issues, it worked great. Then this 2.0 rolls out… and the system, while functionally beautiful, is atrocious. The slowdowns are killing us. They either didn’t do proper testing, or need to update their servers. It’s like having a Ferrari with a Geo’s engine. Repeated queries to the Help desk have gleaned no information…
I’m ready to cancel it and move to something better BUT– big problem with these things is that you can’t just “come off” it. You have to migrate all your old data and links. This is a huge nightmare… So here we are in vendor lock-in, and the vendor has done something stupid and won’t admit to it.
How very Web 1.0.
Michael, can you confirm the Google aquisition of Jotspot? it is on their developer site…. http://develope...ot.com/WikiHome