EXTRANET NEWS * Week of 27 October 2003

EXTRANET NEWS * Week of 27 October 2003
Editors: Joel Orr and N'omi Orr
http://www.extranetnews.com

1. VARIETIES OF COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCE: SOCIALTEXT
2. THE LIST
3. TIDBITS
4. QUOTE OF THE WEEK

1. VARIETIES OF COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCE: SOCIALTEXT

Joel interviewed Ross Mayfield, founder and CEO of Socialtext (www.Socialtext.com).

“Socialtext Workspace is a new kind of collaborative environment, a social software collaboration platform, blurring the distinctions and overlapping the boundaries of blogs, wikis, and email,” said Mayfield. “We are mainly centered around project communications. We add unstructured communication to project management.”

At the Socialtext website, you’ll find a nicely designed invitation to a free 30-day trial. Some introductory text reads: “The way knowledge workers work isn't business process, it's business practice. It's time to trust our employees, free them of counter-productive constraints and empower them to construct solutions on the fly to get their work done. With tools designed to support business practice, people give an organization insight into what they know just by doing -- while building a shared memory in a social context.”

Socialtext Workspace’s beta-users’ experience seems to bear this out. The totally Web-based tool is highly scalable, having supported as many as 400 users in a single shared space.

The wiki part provides real-time collaborative document editing. Anyone can edit, and a document evolves organically. Prior revisions of each page are saved, and can be accessed by simply clicking on “Revisions.”

Simple wiki punctuation is less confusing than html, and lets you do similar things to your text--make it bold, italic, underlined; make it into a link to another page, or to a url; set it up to send an email. You can include graphics, have lists, and have heading styles. It’s not a complete word processor, but is more than rich enough for collaborative purposes.

There are many subtleties, designed to make the user-experience smooth and predictable, so you are never left at a “dead end.” For example, square brackets are used to designate a link to another wiki page. I used square brackets around a url, wrongly thinking that was the appropriate punctuation. Socialtext created a link to a new wiki page it created with the name of the url.

The blog part does a good job of creating weblogs, diaries of personal entries in chronological order.

You can add entries by emailing them to your workspace.

Powerful search tools let you find anything easily. You can always view lists of recent changes, so that you don’t have to explore the entire space to find out what’s new.

Socialtext has also released an Open Source version, Socialtext Kwikspace. Another version, Socialtext Eventspace, is designed to support conference organizers and participants.

Price: $30/user/month or $995/year for five users.

Our take: There is a lot of flexibility here, and little inherent structure. Some groups--product designers, architects, perhaps--are sure to enjoy the process of discovery, and the open nature of the environment. I suspect, however, that many potential users will feel it’s too loose, and will want clearer boundaries, and will get them- either by making their own usage policies, or by migrating to more-structured products.

This is a powerful collaborative environment whose true strengths for engineering professionals will emerge over time.

2. THE LIST

Total companies: 261 (see who's on The List at http://www.extranetnews.com/).

3. TIDBITS

·HARVARD CDI: On November 5 through 7, 2003, CDI is hosting its annual conference for the AEC/RE industry. http://www.cdi.gsd.harvard.edu/conference2003

·PROJECT EXTRANETS IV: SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATIVE WORKING; MAXIMISING EXTRANETS FOR OPTIMUM RESULTS, organized by Ross Sturley and Construction News, London, England, 3 December 2003, at the IEE Savoy Place. The one I attended a couple of years ago was outstanding. See http://www.projectextranets.co.uk/ for information.

· COFES2004: The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software. Mark your calendar—April 1-4, 2004, in Scottsdale, AZ. Come meet very smart people and talk about the future of engineering technology! http://www.cofes.com

4.QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."

--Helen Keller

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