PBWiki is on a bit of a roll. After confirming a $2 million round of financing last week, they’ve just launched a partnership with 30Boxes that allows users to insert a calendar into a wiki. Actually getting the calendar into the wiki requires way too many steps, and I agree with 30Boxes founder Narendra Rocherolle that this should be made into a template option, as Jotspot did in 2006, shortly before their acquisition by Google.
Wikis are basically commodities at this point. There are dozens of hosted and unhosted versions to choose from, and revenue models are pretty thin. PBWiki has a loyal following of users, though, and has spent very little money getting to where they are today. We’ll see how they do over the next year.
So, what do I use PBWiki for? To prepare collaborated grocery list ?
Anybody here really use it other than just for sake of “trying new thing”.
General comments.
There is market potential for “Collaborate” concept, but nobody really solved the problem. There are wikis, there are these “collaborate” office tools – doc, spreadsheet,project management. But none of these really work in real time. Users are abandoning these after using it for couple of projects.We are stuck at the same level – wikipedia was successful, so everything has to follow same pattern.
Wake up and think outside the box.
I use it for internal shared to do lists and notes at the company I work for. I’ve also performed a collaborative interview using PBWiki, I put up some questions and invited 4 people to edit the wiki and put in their answers at their convenience.
Probably my favorite use of PBWiki though was working with the Spirit of America foundation to put up guides on blogging anonymously in 5 languages, for bloggers living under repressive governments. That’s at http://blogsafer.org Someone else compiled and translated the guides then we put it up in a wiki so that as government tactics changed, people could change the guides accordingly. There are about 40 people subscribed to the recent changes RSS feed for that wiki to make sure the site doesn’t get vandalized. PBWiki was great for putting up text in other languages, including ones read right-to-left.
I’ve used other wikis and would again, but I do like PBWiki for its ease of use and power features.
Thanks for the post and all the kind words. Michael, we’ll be adding the 30 Boxes calendar as a template option within a few days.
We’re also actively looking for partners to bring great tools to our users, so if your company has something interesting like 30 Boxes, please get in touch (ramit@pbwiki.com).
Velioncho(#1): Check out some ideas/examples of wiki uses here:
http://yummy.pb...or-using-PBwiki
I agree with Marshall, there are many very good reasons to use wikis from time to time.
For me itËšs sharing information with coworkers.
Very handy.
I installed DokuWiki on my own server though.
Feels more secure.
Both of my companies rely heavily on PBWiki. It’s our internal office corkboard. Everything for employee contact info to NOC contacts at datacenters to our peering point information is kept there.
Policies and other notes and documentation as well.
You do need to do some good wiki gardening, but that applies to any wiki, not just a PBWiki.
-david
hmm – David, do the employees know their info is in an online place outside the “firewall”. It does seem like a potentially good choice for a small company intranet. Cheaper and quicker.
Barcampers love PBWiki
http://barcamp.org/
Jesus. Now BarCamp is spamming us.
Ive installed and used twiki and mediawiki using them in completely different ways. If all you want is a todo list there are much better programs to use. Taskfreak is an open source task manager written in php and works great for small groups.
I just wanted to let people who are looking at wiki’s for task managenment and notes there are better solutions.
isn’t this something that pbwiki could have implemented themselves?
it’s not that big of an overhaul
anyone know the revenue split of the two partnering co.s?
this feature has been available for at least a month
I am a big fan of PBWiki, it was quite accidental as I never thought that we would ever use a wiki, but it was fun to say… wiki. Here is a portion of a post I did on my blog about web 2.0 services that we use daily. PBWiki
We use this for our internal company wiki. The company wiki has information that is related to all of our business operations, for example – phone & fax numbers, addresses, FAQ’s, software info, etc. We set this up as all of our information was spread around from person to person & when changes were made some people were not informed. Now with the wiki, all the information everybody had is online & can be updated in real time.
http://www.shin...iving.com/?p=17
I know this isn’t the standard TechCrunch fare, but wiki’s are an excellent collaboration tool for students and teachers. The ability for students to work collaboratively in a transparent environment, where their work will be on display for an audience is a big motivating factor.
The crew over at PBWiki has also been very sensitive to the educational community by providing ad free wiki’s to educational entities. I did a School 2.0 presentation today with Stanford Student Teachers and will do another tomorrow with Graduate students in Educational Technology at NDNU, PBWiki is a central part of the conversation because of their educational commitment. When I finished my presentation and cruised the room to assist students, I found that three students had already created PBWiki’s and had already began to include content to their sites.
I have used it (with Marshall) for the BlogSafer.org project, for our super awesome mega band the Dream Teens (http:dreamteens.pbwiki.com), as ‘internal bulletin boards’ (as someone said) for my work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (before they sprayed a panicked load and pulled them all down, certain hackers would target them because, really, who wouldn’t want the meeting agenda for the theatre’s web working group), as a mini-digital storage unit for a book I’m working on, and as an ad-hoc portfolio for a job interview process I’m currently in the middle of. Easy to use.
How many folks gave up after the initial honeymoon is over?Wiki is just not practical for me.
I’ve been using them for a year now. Once I did the first one, I was sold. However, it’s a little daunting to some people. Once you do get them contributing, they tend to really value it.
That could be a good partnership.
Wiki is a crowded field, especially with WikiMedia offering their Wiki for free.
Regarding Michael Arrington’s “Jesus. Now BarCamp is spamming us” to my earlier comment.
I think Michael took it all wrong. I have not gone to any BarCamps, and do not represent any. I just noticed that they are big users of PBWiki, and there was discussion here regarding “who needs a wiki”. I don’t spam people, don’t know why you thought my comment was spam. And I doubt most BarCampers would be the type of people that spam others.
I am currently supporting a few very successful wikis for higher ed, in MediaWiki, but PBWiki would be our first choice for a hosted solution.
Calendars are standard (and have been) in wiki applications like http://www.centraldesktop.com
or
http://www.atla...are/confluence/
For what I know, wikis are especially good when your information architecture is rather static, when your content volume is high, and when your contributors have the feeling of building for life.
Wikipedia is typically this, and any structured repository that seems to be eternal by nature (like imdb or whatsoever) should be easily wikied.
But I can’t follow the previous comments about managing your small business backoffice using a wiki.
Being a grateful user of open source software (the packages we sell reuse Mozilla and Tomcat), I must confess we tried many solutions before deciding to move our project management intranet to… Google Apps (sigh!)
Have a look at our checklist, they have most of it :
- Online spreadsheet, calendars, timesheet, with public, company and private access rights granularity (full support)
- Wysiwyg edition of documents like briefings, design, test reports, etc, that anyone can export to meaningful desktop format (full support).
- Changing prioritization of projects and tasks (no support).
IMHO, regarding project management, Wikis are lacking of those basics.
Of course, Google Apps won’t let you solve the core management task of a project-oriented company working on microprojects (projects of an average duration of 10 mandays): enter data in context and and change priorities.
For what we know, such a a flexible operations software for small project-oriented companies is still missing.
We’ve been reviewing and/or trying the following options :
- Wiki’s.
- Several bug tracking/issue tracking packages.
- Trac.
- Microsoft Project.
- Ketura.
- Custom development with Filemaker/Access.
- etc…
Those solutions are useless. The problem is in the core of the functionality : prioritization and contextual data entry.
First, regarding data entry, the picture is poor : you can generally edit one record at a time. This makes impossible to balance your decisions with the rest of the project and of the agenda, and you find yourself infinitely switching between tables (for making decisions) and forms (to write them down).
Moreover, in order to manage the coherence of the relational data, those solutions won’t let you add a single thing (subtask, work amount, material) that is not tangled to previously defined records in two or three tables.
Consequence : when Dude calls you up to say “There is a problem on te package. I’ll need my friend Doe, the guy I told you about the other day, to help me four hours this afternoon, may I have him ?”, you’re with 15min work before you write the data (create subtask, allocate subtask to task, create Doe, allocate Doe to team, allocate Doe to task, define Dude as project manager, send emails to everybody) and say “OK Dude, go on!”.
This probably makes sense in a big vendor’s backoffice, but not for us.
With our Google Apps system, we just say: “OK Dude, go on, I’ve put a line for Doe in the project sheet, could you please be so kind to tell me what Doe will ask for a price on that one?”
Regarding prioritization, PM packages are terrible : there is no support for changing prioritisation of projects other than changing the data in all the aggregated tasks. It is really difficult to define priorities that don’t match the default rules of the software.
And anyone in project management knows that, even if you’re more RUP than XP, changing priorities is the most strategic and creative part of your work. Yes, IMHO, those PM products just don’t let you do your work correctly…
So, for what we know, wiki’s don’t have the core project-management features… but project management programs neither!
So, we now use a web portal where we aggregate editable datasources stored in Google Apps. Of course, prioritization, reporting and billing must be done ‘by hand’ but the result is : nobody need a technical training and everyone contributes easily at the right place, in an exportable, reusable format.
This being said, we’ve been wandering a lot, and I am conscious we still could have it all wrong. So please tell us more in case you still think we should use a wiki or a good project mpanagement package.
I currently have a 30Boxes calendar widget on my web site and it works great. It’s super easy to use to add/edit calendar events. Looking forward to the new product that comes out of this partnership!
If you use 30Boxes a lot on OS X, check out “30b.app” which lets you run 30boxes.com as a separate app which lives on your dock:
http://jinsync.com/?q=node/9