PBwiki on the go, impressive.

I got to tip my hat to PBwiki, as they continue to impress me.  PBwiki now offers a mobile experience  for both the iPhone and BlackBerry (see press release).  I’d like to step back with you to help you appreciate the value of this announcement.

Wikis are an important and valuable tool for modern businesses.  Many analysts and industry experts have written about the facts – the quantitative and qualitative evidence – that supports this assertion.  One of the top Wiki experts around, Stewart Mader, knows this incredibly well.  I’m honored that he quoted my findings about this on his blog.  And CIO.com wrote a great summary of a report I published on how to select an Enterprise wiki.  One challenge is: there are many wiki options to chose from.  So today I want to shine a little light on one of the vendors I think you should pay attention to – especially given their recent set of announcements.

PBwiki provides hosted wikis that are very easy to use.  But if that was all, I would not write this post.  Now, I happen to be impressed that PBwiki pays attention to the academic market.  I think this provides them great feedback from an under-serviced audience, and perhaps it allows them to grow future loyalists.  Most importantly, our educational system needs to teach collaboratives behaviors and tools.  Putting wikis in universities and schools — the classrooms, clubs, PTO, newsletters, libraries, projects, homework, etc. should result in a better future, I hope.

PBwiki has quite a presence in the public Internet too.  Personally, I often visit  the  Twitter  Apps Fan page - which helps me find out about cool Twitter tools.  This page is hosted on PBwiki.  According the PBwiki’s website, they host more content pages than the English language version of Wikipedia, and more wikis than both WetPaint and Google Sites.

My focus is mainly on the businesses use of collaborative technology — and as it turns out PBwiki has an impressive presence here too.  Now, there are many businesses who will not consider hosted vendors like PBwiki – who host data on their servers in the “cloud”, not on your servers in your datacenter.  For a large, but shrinking, number of businesses, off-premise data is a non-starter.  But many others have overcome initial concerns, and are benefiting from the efficiencies of low-cost, low-maintenance, solutions that simply work.  I spent much of my day this past Tuesday at the IDC Directions’09 forum hearing about the growing relevance of Cloud and SaaS.  It’s a reality for many, at least in some parts of their business.

I have been watching as PBwiki adds more business-focused features and services.  One important feature was the inclusion of lightweight document management features. You can upload, share, and download files (document, images, etc.) with others.  The document management features are not too fancy, but they are good enough for most.  When I first saw these features, I thought of the way most people use SharePoint as a simple document management server with some lightweight page markup capabilities.  In reality, SharePoint provides a powerful platform that includes much more than document management.  But most companies I have spoken with don’t use a small fraction of SharePoint’s features.  For many, SharePoint gives them more than they will use, but less than they need.  And this begs the question – would you be better served with a hosted wiki that provides simple document management?  If you are like many who just use SharePoint for doc management and page markup, but you need to collaborate with partners outside your firewall, then PBwiki becomes quite interesting.

Then PBwiki added a 24/7 end user support service.  For just a few bucks more per user, you can get the assurance of online support, anytime.  I don’t know how many of their business customers use the support feature, but I’m sure they all like the message that PBwiki is sending by offering this service.  Business Wikis are about business – and PBwiki gets it.   

And now to this week’s announcement: You can take the wiki with you on your mobile device.   Although you don’t get full editing  capabilities on the mobile device, you can read wiki pages, search for content, create new pages,  and add comments to existing pages.  And there’s no fancy URL to remember since PBwiki’s servers detect if you are using an iPhone or BlackBerry and provide you an experienced optimized for your device automatically.  This is critical for those business needs that arise when you are not at your computer.  Like when you are in a meeting, with a client, a patient, or vendor.  On the road, working from home, or on the shop floor.  Information availability is critical to agile businesses.

I had a chance to speak with a very satisfied PBwiki customer, an investment holding company that is involved in a bunch of businesses — ranging from aerospace engineering, personnel services, telecommunications, casinos, real estate, you name it.  Each business manages their own affairs and technology infrastructure, but the central businesses group collaborates with each of the satellite businesses.  The central group is relatively small, and they have no need to spend lots of money on technology infrastructure.  but they do need the flexibility to work with their contacts in each of their affiliates.

There are many business with similar profiles — like PR agencies who interface with multiple customers.  I spoke with one who expressed the same pattern of need.  They need an easy to use, SaaS based, secure platform to co-create and share documents with many partners.  They know that email is the wrong tool for fluid collaboration. And they want to keep things simple and cheap.  They can handle monthly per-user charges, since they operate that way with other vendors too.

PBwiki provides a compelling option for these Enterprise Wiki buyers.  I don’t believe they are the best option for everyone – sorry, but no one offers that silver bullet yet.  But I do believe they should be on your short-list if you are looking for hosted wiki solutions.

Tagged as: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, mobile, success story, tool, wiki