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December 09, 2004

Will wikis replace commercial collaboration software?

From a large technology company's web site:

Wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weeky") is server software that allows users to create and edit Web content using any browser. It was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a programmer who named it after the Hawaiian word for quick.

The largest wiki site is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia with articles contributed, corrected, and updated by its users. It recently topped one million articles. Its English language version alone has 350,000 pages – three times as many as the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica. More than 25,000 contributors have written or edited at least 10 articles.

There are many others. There are wiki cookbooks, dictionaries and collections of quotations. Teachers use wikis to stimulate discussion. Software developers have used them to create online manuals. Like familiar Internet publishing tools, wiki uses HTML and supports hyperlinks. But unlike traditionally produced pages, wiki Web pages may be edited by anyone with access to them. Users are free to add, delete, and amend content, and even reorganize pre-existing content, regardless of who originally created the pages. Think of it as open source editing. In many respects, it's even more open than Linux. Wiki engines use plain language and don't require programming skills or special training. And, unlike Linux, changes are put into effect almost immediately, without the wait or approval required for inclusion in the next Linux kernel. Given the inherent openness of wiki pages, they are vulnerable to vandalism and spam, but abuses have been rare and tend to be short-lived because an uneditable document history can be used to quickly restore the page to an earlier state and offending users can be banned.

An analyst from tech consultants Frost and Sullivan said the market for Internet collaborative applications reached $472 million last year. Frost and Sullivan forecasts the market to grow to $3 billion by 2010.

Wikis are still below the radar of most companies. But just as instant messaging's earliest adopters were consumers, this technology could be readily adopted by businesses of all sizes. The security vulnerabilities of open-to-all wiki sites can be obviated by placing sites behind company firewalls and restricting access with employee- or team-specific criteria.

Some companies, such as the Walt Disney Company and Motorola, are already using wikis. In September 2004, Microsoft introduced a wiki authoring tool called FlexWiki, which runs on its .NET platform. It is even sharing FlexWiki's source code with developers and customers participating in its "shared source" initiative. This is Microsoft's third limited release of source code this year. The company hopes developers given access to the source code of some .NET applications will be less attracted to work with apps using Java and other open standards.

Wikis have the potential to dampen the demand for [proprietary] messaging and collaboration software for large enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While they may not offer all the features that [proprietary] software does, open source wikis are, or soon may be, good enough for many businesses.

Posted by Mike at December 9, 2004 12:13 PM

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