Enterprise wiki providers fighting for customers

via Techdirt. While we now have two (at least) commercial Wiki software providers it seems they are fighting with each other over new customers. Personally I don't see it as a bad sign, more an interesting one.

Wiki's are a new concept and the selling of them within an organisation is going to take a fairly long period of time. In the meantime the only customers for these two players are existing organisations who have an understanding of the tools. The customers will probably have an existing open source tool, like TWiki, and want to leverage the benefits of a commercial offering. I completely understand where this is coming from being an early adopter of web based employee self service during the 90's. Many of the vendors spent most of the late 90's educating the Australian HR market on the benefits, not 7-8 years on every vendor has a solution and every client wants it. The same will happen eventually with wiki's.

I have looked at what JotSpot has to offer and the marketing hype sells a very good message, however time will tell if the reality matches once several organisations take it for a drive and we get some public feedback. What I think is missing in the marketplace is a combined tool the corporates can install, a solution that provides both blogs and wiki's in one package. This way both tools can be deployed and used where appropriate for the problems being faced int he enterprise. Take this a step further, the tool should also have traditional threaded discussions and email mailing lists as these are still needed for certain types of applications.

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