Don’t get me wrong. I really appreciate the work Ross and his team is doing on SocialText. The open source version of SocialText is a major step towards an enterprise level wiki available to anyone.

A step back: with the acquisition of JotSpot by Google the world of enterprise wikis is deeply going to change. What I expect is that Google is not only interested to embed this new tool into their online office suite. The real innovative part for them is JotSpot’s extensible application framework and the ability for end-users to write and add new pieces inside it.

If I’m right, forget JotSpot as an enterprise wiki. It will be something different (maybe better but still different) after the Google’s touch. This also means a big opportunity for competitors still playing the wiki game (Confluence and Social Text among the best ones).

I’m not actually sure if competitor wikis do a better job on the usability side, but after my previous post on the topic and after Ross’ comment about the availability of the new release of Social Text, I gave it a try (hosted version) and I was disappointed.

The new version has a better usability and information architecture (see the dashboard for example), probably more attractive colors and graphics but a wiki for me is still a tool to write and share text with images embedded into it. Social Text 2.0’s aim is being the most usable and simplest one on the market.

Try to upload an image or to drag it through the page both with Internet Explorer or Firefox! It is absolutely impossible. As you can read from the release notes, you have to use the advanced editor to do that (advanced for me is a synonym for stupid editor because it means having to deal with the wiki syntax again). The advanced editor is also needed to do a number of other operations on the page and with Internet Explorer I experienced a number of crashes and very weird behaviors as well. To understand which features are not working in the simple mode you have to read release notes because the associated buttons are present into the user interface!

Other examples: renaming a page is now possible, but try to finding this functionality by yourself!

I’m sorry, but to me usability is something different, especially for an enterprise level product.

Well the new version is very very new and people at SocialText are probably working on this (probably also on the MySql support and other missing features). I would be happy to know soon that similar bugs have been fixed and to use it for my company.

Further Reading:

• Socialtext 2.0 Beta
• Socialtext Open 2.0 is coming soon
• Socialtext 2 Design

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.