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Socialtext, SaaS, and upgrading enterprise wikis

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:11:00 -0400

Noted wiki vendor Socialtext has been busy appearing at high-profile conferences to promote their concept of business social software. However, recent experience suggests the still-young company may remain a little too fascinated by exciting new features rather than supporting and maintaining their customer base.

As we mentioned in the Socialtext review in the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008, customers were concerned earlier this year over quite a few upgrade problems with the hosted Socialtext service. Recent reports from customers suggest that the popular service remains quite a bumpy ride. Here's a few of the issues that Socialtext customers have reported over the past few month:

The one and only reporting feature in Socialtext -- weekly usage reports -- stopped working back in May
The search feature was suddenly substantially changed. Now search results no longer sort by default according to last edited date, but by relevance. This may seem an improvement, but try a search on a public Socialtext wiki and you'll find that it still takes some time getting used to.
In another incremental upgrade, international characters were transformed to garbage, e.g., the Danish "æ" became an "Ål" and "å" became "Å¥."

It is also worth adding that while Socialtext formally announced version 3 back in April, the hosted service is today still running version 2.22, almost 5 months later.

The larger issue here is that as a SaaS customer you remain very much in the hands of the vendor. Often that's a good thing ("our upgrades happen automatically"); sometimes it's a bad thing ("we can't chose to postpone an upgrade"). How well your SaaS vendor prepares you and performs proper regression testing may seriously impact your project. Enterprises don't like surprises, but it appears like Socialtext still has some way to go here

When a Wiki package gets too real

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:46:00 -0400

In talking to wiki users, we find a wide range of sophistication. Some are quite content with the simplistic "edit this page" features you can now find in most Web CMS and Social Software suites, while other customers seek more advanced features (such as topical refactoring and advanced aggregation and print services) that constitute for them a "real" wiki.

And then there are those who cut their teeth editing Wikipedia pages or learned about wikis by using the earliest tools. They come with a particular set of expectations -- especially around using good old fashioned "Wikitext" mark-up -- that today are met largely through the MediaWiki platform, the same tool that powers Wikipedia.

As Enterprise Social Software Report readers know, MediaWiki tends to find favor among wiki purists, but is often perceived as too arcane by novice users. Here's a nice summary of some relevant issues by consultant Dan Katz. (Thanks to Janus for the link.)

I'm more sanguine about open source wiki options and less enthusiastic about Socialtext than Katz, but he makes some very good points regardless of the tool you select. The key for you the customer is, as always, to test with "real" users before you deploy...

Announcing the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The full name is actually Enterprise Social Software Report 2008: Networking & Collaboration Within and Beyond the Enterprise. Enterprises are increasingly using social tools -- some new, some not so new -- within and beyond enterprise boundaries. As one side effect, those boundaries are increasingly blurring, even though vendors still find it difficult to satisfy both internal and external scenarios.

The report evaluates 20 Social Software vendors against eleven common scenarions, weighing in at about 400 pages. Turns out there are a lot of differences among vendors and approaches. The tools may espouse a light touch, but many of the architectures are far from trivial. Our media release today highlights just one potential challenge you may face implementing at an enterprise level: the general dearth of system services (like configuration management) across this space.

The report is available for pre-order today. Subscribers will receive their copy in a week or so when the official version gets burned out.