Since 2002 Socialtext has developed simple tools for the way people want to work. A year ago we released Socialtext Workspace 1.0, which provided an integrated wiki, weblog and email toolset that enabled efficient group communication. What’s remarkable is how over 50 enterprise customers have adapted the Workspace to create solutions and applications in ways we couldn’t anticipate. We lead an emerging market that we believe has tremendous potential. As Socialtext refines its platform to enable something you could call Wiki 2.0, our approach is to pave the paths our customers have worn while staying true to principles of social software.
Wikis have always been about keeping it simple. Simple enough for users, but powerful enough when they are creative and work with others. Complexity has always been the achilles heel of collaboration and other enterprise systems.
Socialtext is building on the principles from wikis and weblogs.
- Wiki remove barriers to communication
- Wikis never fail – there are no broken links, only new pages
- Wikis are about trust and openness
- Wikis and blogs help people manage attention by showing what’s new
- Wikis and blogs help discover conversations
- Wikis helps people build solutions on the fly
- Wiki supports agile, adaptive process
Wikis are first and foremost about communication. That’s why the first thing we’ve done has been to integrate Socialtext with email, instant messaging, and Skype.
Wikis rely on openness and trust to remove barriers to communication. Success in collaborative applications is always social, which is partly about the group, and partly in the affordances of the tool. Over time, much collaborative software has been shelfware. We’ve studied the successes of wikis and weblog communication in the public internet, and the social patterns among our clients. We help our clients with the effective practices. In a corporate setting we balance openness and trust with ability to manage privacy for groups, but in a way that is conducive to social success. A typical corporate application thinks about access control — we think about how to facilitate invitations and group-forming.
Weblogs are about the ecosystem, as much as they’re about individual blogs. The weblog ecosystem includes tools and services like Daypop, Technorati, Trackback to connect and see patterns. We’re starting to integrate this design pattern into our social software toolset. We’re using web services to bring together tools that help discover conversations (Technorati), connect people (Atom), and reveal social context (Touchgraph). This same simple approach, driven by our customer requirements, is leading to open integration with enterprise systems and productivity tools.
Wikis come from the open source community. The core of Socialtext is open source Kwiki, which is the wiki used for O’Reilly open source conferences, and internally at O’Reilly. Kwiki development accumulates value — when plugins are developed in Kwiki and released to the community, other developers build on that work. We’re already getting benefit from open source work — the Atom development, messaging integration, comes from the community. Performance enhancements are coming from the community. This is the business model of the 2005. Contribute to the open source and web services ecosystem, and get back manyfold.
Wikis are about agile process — radically removing barriers to change. Wikis were designed to support agile software development. We’ve been working with customers for 18 months, understanding the effective practices to support agile collaboration in different business process. As a next step, customers are telling us that they want a little bit of structure. Today our customers create applications through the use of metadata and communication routing, for solutions such as customer care and project management. We can make this process more efficient while keeping it simple. In personal computing, the spreadsheet was a revolution because it let individuals flexibly change structured information. The wiki hyperspreadsheet will do the same for groups.
This week at the Web 2.0 Conference, Socialtext will be demonstrating its implementation of the Web as a Platform. Participants are collaborating through a private Eventspace with over 500 attendees.
We are providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with customer Mike Pusateri from Disney. Disney is representative of our customers with their approach to enterprise IT based upon open standards and an ecosystem of tools.
We also shared a new customer case study, Informative’s use of Socialtext as a People’s Portal.
We are also proud to announce another major customer, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, who uses the Socialtext Appliance to improve productivity, reduce email overload foster the sharing of knowledge.
The bottom line, based upon the support from our A-list investors, wonderful things are happening while staying true to the wiki way. Most of what we do is relatively boring — make stuff, sell stuff, realize value. But when you have customers to listen to, they tell you amazing things. Like that the simplest thing that could possibly work actually does. Like that our vision is what they want. Like we can embrace change together.
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