Business Week has noticed Wikis, and their potential to improve collaboration. Here’s a little of what they have to say:

Nowhere is that potential more apparent than in today’s far-flung, time-pressed corporate teams. Aaron Burcell, director of marketing for e-mail software startup Stata Laboratories Inc., says working on a wiki has cut the daily phone calls he made on a raft of projects to one a week. It also has allowed Stata to outsource more work, such as engineering, to India. Says Burcell: “I could justify the cost of the wiki just from the lower teleconferencing bills.”

Read the full article

It’s true, wikis are very effective, and they may even be a killer app, but there’s one major problem with them: they’re not Microsoft word. The average user doesn’t want to learn a wiki markup language, no matter how simple and easy to use, because it’s not Word. Instead, they have to use systems like sharepoint which in my experience ends up being so difficult to use that most people don’t use it at all.

Source: Scobleizer

Posted by Mike on Saturday, May 29th, 2004 at 4:54 pm.