My second contact with Social Software was with Wikis. My first was with Blogs btw. I used MediaWiki, the software that runs the Wikipedia, to build up a site for my open source / bachelor / scientific project BioWeka (an extension to the data mining Weka for bioinformatics). Wikis are a great tool for collaborative working, especially in open projects with distributed team members with different software configurations. However, in my opinion Wikis are not ideal for companies. Most Wiki software lacks of essential tools: user-right-management, file-management and especially Office Software integration. Of course, there are products which call themselves Wikis and offer these features, but they are more than a Wiki: they are document and collaboration management tools with a Wiki feature.

When we began our business (as a Second Life company btw.) we used Word to write our business plan, PowerPoint to design our customer presentations and Excel to calculate our costs and prices. We didn’t had an office and we were seven team members. So it was a hard job to get them all to the same place at the same time. Of course, Skype and e-mails can help, but not enough, especially if you are trying to work all on the same PowerPoint presentation. You need something like a source code repository system. However, a tool like Subversion is too complicated for most non-developers. So we decided to rent a Sharepoint server.

Now we had a Wiki and a document-management system. You can open Microsoft Office documents directly from the Sharepoint site and save them directly back to the server (until you do not use Office 2007 on Windows Vista! There seems to be an ugly bug which prevents that.) The Sharepoint server tracks every version of a particular file and locks it until the editor closes the application. This is a really helpful feature.

We also use the integrated Wiki, but in comparison to MediaWiki it is castrated. Finally, we intensively use the feature to create online lists or tables which you can connect and export its content to Excel for analysis. We use them to track our website features, working hours, tasks, appointments (both linked with Outlook), project milestones, bookmarks, meeting agendas, contacts etc. For each list you can subscribe via RSS or get a notification via e-mail.

In my opinion Sharepoint is a great tool that needs another version to be mature. If you live in the Microsoft ecosystem (Windows, Office, Visual Studio etc.) it’s maybe the best tool available. However, before you buy it, rent it and test it whether it fits your needs! And have a good time!