Startup PBWorks, which was formally known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has steadily added innovative, real-time features to its platform, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging.
Today, PBworks is entering the stream by adding real-time functionality and voice collaboration within the application. PBWorks is adding four new features to its suite:
Instant Messaging
The startup is adding IM functionality to the application, which looks and operates just like Gchat. The platform allows PBWorks users in their organization to send them instant messages from within the product. Users can also request for co-workers to look at the workspace page they’re working on using the “send a link” function built into the IM system.
Live Notifications
Similar to notifications in a Facebook stream, PBWorks is adding Live Notifications alerts, which lets users know the different activity within their organization in real-time. Users can select which notifications they want to receive, based on their preferences (known as “starring” or “following” particular pages), and the system will stream relevant notifications to whatever page a user is viewing. The notifications provide a link to whatever the employee is working on.
Live Editing
PBWorks is now upgrading its collaboration features by adding a the ability for users to share a PBworks editing session. So whenever a user is editing a workspace page, other users viewing that page see the edits appear in real-time as well as participate in edits.
Voice Collaboration
Conference calls are a daily part of any business’s day-to-day operations and PBWorks is now allowing this to take place within its application. Users can initiate an instant conference call by dialing several participants at the same time. Each conference call is recorded and stored for later review, which is an extremely useful feature. Voice Collaboration can even be triggered via PBWorks using an iPhone.
PBworks, which had an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses with a project management application and a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. The incorporation of real-time functionality as a natural extension of PBWorks makes the platform a whole lot more attractive, as more and more enterprise-focused startups are adding real-time features to applications. So if a user is editing a page and realizes that he or she needs the input of other team members, the user can request fellow employees to join the appropriate page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call.
Currently, PBworks manages 50,000 wiki groups with over 3 million users and has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams at over a third of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University.
Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Jive, and Socialtext.
And of course, we can draw comparisons to Google Wave, Google’s much-hyped new collaboration platform.
And if you happen to be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, you can stop by the PBworks booth for a live demo of all the new features!
I used PBWorks before this last iteration and has powerful capabilities. Strikes me that it’s most recent version is similar to features in Google Wave. Not sure I would pay to get those features I have in Google Wave.
The key to PBworks is that it focus on team collaboration, versus Wave, which focuses on the individual.
Wave’s inbox metaphor is intended to help bring real-time interactivity to email, but for teamwork, the workspace metaphor that PBworks uses is more appropriate.
For ad hoc collaboration, Wave works well, much like email. But for structured collaboration, PBworks provides a better solution.
It’s also the case that PBworks remains relatively simple to use, while Wave (while powerful) is more complex.
I think you meant ‘formerly known as’ rather than ‘formally known as’ in your first sentence.
I agree with Chris, Wave is a very powerful tool – but having seen it in action still pretty complex to use and really focussing around ad-hoc individual collaboration.
These new tools are great and a few of them are things we prototyped and will be bringing into our tool later on. The only thing I don’t like about PBWorks is it’s document management. While Wikis are a great tool – managing your documents as attachments to those pages isn’t ideal and considering most collaboration in our experiance still focusses on documents we took a different approach with our tool and concentrated on the document management:
http://www.samb...we-did-sambajam
We’re in private Beta right now and if you’re interested in this space we’d really love to send you an invite and get some feedback from other professionals in this space.
http://www.samb...am-private-beta
David
Integrated instant messaging, live notifications, live editing, and voice fill
out collaboration suite
what else do we need..
PBworks is far simpler and more intuitive than Wave. Live notifications and Voice collaboration are great additions. Keep up the good work!
PBworks looks awesome!
Are there any competitive open source platforms? Looking for the tech AND ui. Many have the tech but are sooo ugly. Like Mindtouch or perhaps Alfresco. Not to mention all those wikis. Aren’t there any designers working in the OS industry? Give me just one pretty OS Collaboration Platform thats looks good?
Bo – We’re actually building our platform on top of Alfresco and Google Web Toolkit (like wave) – we may open-source parts of the platform in future as we’re big supporters of the OS movement!
David – that will be intersting.
Alfresco for shure has the tech, but not the ui. Share is ok but compared to PB it’s nothing. If you follow their forums there are almost no one discussing ui or usability. I find this strange because a bigger part of the webapp revolution is about ui/interaction.
It certainly looks like an improvement. I’m loving the chat thing. However, I’ve got a feeling it’s still a bit too complex/techie for the general public. I saw a comment once which asked “could a silver haired CEO pick it up and use it”? I’d think probably not.
I’m sticking with http://www.glasscubes.com for the time being but will definitely keep an eye on these guys.
I’m still not convinced Wave has a place in my organisation… just because it’s Google doesn’t make me want to give up the way I work just yet. Give me a few more years of email for now.
From my experience, PBworks has been an awesome collaboration tool for team projects and sharing data (vs. constant back and forth file emailing). The conferencing feature is really cool too- i’m looking forward to seeing what the team releases next.
Looks good, keep up the good work