Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The content and knowledge management magazine KMWorld ran an article last month titled Wiki tools are not all the same, reminding readers that, while wikis have become commonplace - almost ubiquitous - wiki software has hardly adopted a cookie cutter set of features. Compare this to word processing software, for example. The basic features of word processing tools are the same across the competition. Wiki software, on the other hand, still differs on many basic features.
As the article puts it:
Today, most of the industry discussion about wikis centers on critical issues of improving adoption and maximizing business value.This prompts some commentators to claim that the type of wiki software or vendor you select doesn’t matter. After all, wiki solutions are not hard to procure. ... Actually, the tool you select matters a lot.
The remainder of the article points out six key areas of differentiation. WikiMatrix is a great place to compare wiki software offerings. But since I've got your attention, here's where EditMe stands, philosophically and feature-wise, on each.
Many wiki vendors - especially the open source offerings - have stuck with wiki markup. EditMe was the first hosted wiki service to offer an HTML-based WYSIWYG editor in place of cryptic wiki markup. Since then, the lion's share of commercial competitors have followed suit, and even some open source alternatives. At the end of the day, you're not going to get a busy sales guy to learn wiki markup.
The beauty of wikis is in their self-organizing nature. Pages link to related pages, and create a contextual navigation. This is a good thing, and sometimes its enough. But the fact is people are used to navigation in web sites, and organizing pages into a sensible navigation is just helpful. EditMe lets you associates pages with parent and child relationships that make up a flexible organization and navigation structure. Rather than just building navigation, these relationships take on the self-organizing spirit of wiki in that the relationship can mean different things depending on how they're used. Many commercial wikis simply use folders for organizing wiki pages, which, while safe and familiar, feels like a step backward.
All wikis offer Recent Changes reports, and most can email users about changes. EditMe has shied away from adding per-page change monitoring. This is useful for massive wikis, like Wikipedia, and this reflects EditMe's focus on smaller and more focused wikis. Not all offer a side-by-side tool to compare revisions (e.g. Diff), and EditMe does. It's crucial to be able to see what exactly has changed between two versions.
When EditMe started, wikis didn't have access controls. This was a version 1.0 feature for EditMe, and the simple three level security model has been duplicated in many other commercial wikis. With the addition of Groups and Policies, EditMe embraced the need for more granular controls. Some wikis handle this by providing sub-sites that can each have their own security. But being able to single out individual pages and assign named policies seems like a more flexible option. Unlike some wikis, EditMe has avoided copying either the UNIX style or Windows style file access control models - both seem ill-suited to wikis.
Approvals is an area that wikis looking to serve Enterprise customers have implemented in the face of customer demand. These customers have been using Web 1.0 knowledge and content management tools and expect the ability to moderate and configure approval chains for edits. EditMe has refused to do this. At the most basic level, approval workflows work against what makes wikis work. If such a feature is really needed, a good content management platform is probably a better fit.
Most EditMe wikis are either fully password protected or require registration for editing. But for traditionally open public wikis, spam is a big problem. EditMe also provides a blog-like commenting mechanism, which is a target for spammers. Requiring registration (and better yet, moderating new registrations) has proved an effective anti-spam method. But for sites that want to allow anonymous participation, EditMe's proprietary captcha system has proven an effective deterrent.
Given the huge number of wiki providers to choose from, vendors have focused in on target use cases. EditMe has focused less on specific use cases and instead looked at features commonly found in content management platforms and blurring the line between wiki and traditional content management. Specifically:
Give EditMe a try and see for yourself.
