Thursday, December 02, 2004
Brief Look at Socialtext
Socialtext offers four different products for business collaboration.
1. Socialtext Workspace is the enterprise-level solution, hosted by Socialtext. It includes enterprise weblog publishing (including the ability to update the weblog via e-mail), wiki collaborative documents/webpages, persistent workspaces for use during meetings, and database/knowledge base and administrative tools.
2. Socialtext Appliance is a hardware device containing all the functionality of Workspace. You can plug the device in behind your corporate firewall, and you have a secure collaboration software solution for blogging, wikis, etc.
3. Socialtext Eventspace is a collaboration tool tailored for conferences. It allows conference organizers to set weblogs, wikis, and event spaces. The content generated can be accessed later from persistent workspaces. There are also chat features.
4. Kwiki is Socialtext's open source offering. The company developed Socialtext products as extensions of the Kwiki open source project. Kwiki is highly customizable; the base module is an extremely simple wiki, and all kinds of features and functionality are available as plug-ins to make your Kwiki into the wiki you desire.
Of course, Socialtext has its own blog!
The company culture at Socialtext is different from what I saw at the Traction Software webpages. Socialtext consciously avoids the annoying ® symbols trademarking every product name. They even seem to make fun of the competition over this in a disclaimer on their homepage: "Socialtext, Socialtext Workspace, Socialtext Kwikspace and Socialtext Eventspace are trademarks of Socialtext Incorporated. All rights reserved. We put this obvious statement here because we didn't want to have to bother you with ugly TM's everywhere."
Socialtext also states that "Traditional groupware and knowledge management tools use top-down constraints: pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories. Socialtext takes a bottom-up approach to collaborating and empowers people to develop their own solutions."
By contrast, Traction Software writes with a more command/management tone in their write-up: "Traction Software's Enterprise Weblog software is deployed by business and government teams to create an information sharing system that works like the web. Traction provides a dramatically efficient communication, collaboration and knowledge-sharing medium that presents business information and working communications in context, over time."
I thought both Socialtext and Traction Software had interesting product offerings, and I hope to have the opportunity to explore this type of collaboration software more in the future.
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1. Socialtext Workspace is the enterprise-level solution, hosted by Socialtext. It includes enterprise weblog publishing (including the ability to update the weblog via e-mail), wiki collaborative documents/webpages, persistent workspaces for use during meetings, and database/knowledge base and administrative tools.
2. Socialtext Appliance is a hardware device containing all the functionality of Workspace. You can plug the device in behind your corporate firewall, and you have a secure collaboration software solution for blogging, wikis, etc.
3. Socialtext Eventspace is a collaboration tool tailored for conferences. It allows conference organizers to set weblogs, wikis, and event spaces. The content generated can be accessed later from persistent workspaces. There are also chat features.
4. Kwiki is Socialtext's open source offering. The company developed Socialtext products as extensions of the Kwiki open source project. Kwiki is highly customizable; the base module is an extremely simple wiki, and all kinds of features and functionality are available as plug-ins to make your Kwiki into the wiki you desire.
Of course, Socialtext has its own blog!
The company culture at Socialtext is different from what I saw at the Traction Software webpages. Socialtext consciously avoids the annoying ® symbols trademarking every product name. They even seem to make fun of the competition over this in a disclaimer on their homepage: "Socialtext, Socialtext Workspace, Socialtext Kwikspace and Socialtext Eventspace are trademarks of Socialtext Incorporated. All rights reserved. We put this obvious statement here because we didn't want to have to bother you with ugly TM's everywhere."
Socialtext also states that "Traditional groupware and knowledge management tools use top-down constraints: pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories. Socialtext takes a bottom-up approach to collaborating and empowers people to develop their own solutions."
By contrast, Traction Software writes with a more command/management tone in their write-up: "Traction Software's Enterprise Weblog software is deployed by business and government teams to create an information sharing system that works like the web. Traction provides a dramatically efficient communication, collaboration and knowledge-sharing medium that presents business information and working communications in context, over time."
I thought both Socialtext and Traction Software had interesting product offerings, and I hope to have the opportunity to explore this type of collaboration software more in the future.
# posted by Scott A. Curtis : 9:00 PM
