Tags: Socialtext, Wikis, TiddlyWiki, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Ross Mayfield, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, IBM, Lotus Notes, Groove
WOW! This is a fantastic piece of news! And something that hasn’t gone unnoticed because there have been quite a few folks who have been commenting on it already thus far. Ross Mayfield himself already announced it over at his own weblog here. Socialtext now works offline! Wooohooo ! Socialtext just announced itself as *the* killer app. in the Enterprise wiki space. If you have been working in a distributed or virtual environment, if you are one of those mobile workers constantly travelling from customer site to customer site, back home, back to the customer and so on you would certainly appreciate Socialtext’s announcement. Read on.
I am sure that if you are one of those mobile workers, you may have experienced how frustrating it can become to find a good regular broadband line in order to share your content into the team or community space while you are away from the office so that you can then move on to the next thing. So what Socialtext has done, integrating with the ever so popular TiddlyWiki, is just perhaps closing the gap and starting a new era in this almost semi-connected Internet world, because one of the major concerns from a rather large population of knowledge workers, i.e. that mobile workforce, has just been addressed and fixed!
Everyone now would be able to update content on the fly as they go along, no matter if they are working from the office or while on the road. Everyone now has got the chance to contribute and feel they are part of the team or the community because they have got the same capability to add content as their own colleagues working in an office environment. But, of course, it is not perfect. At least, not yet. Synchronising back to the online wiki space does not seem to be fixing the well know replication conflicts we are all too familiar with, i.e. when two or more people try to update the same page at the same time and replicate that new content back into the same page, that other rather popular collaborative tools like Groove or IBM’s Lotus Notes seem to master very well at the moment. But still, it is a move in the right direction. Why?, you may be wondering.
Well, for one particular reason. Socialtext, by entering the world of remote collaboration while in disconnected mode, is just perhaps the first of the so-called social software technologies available out there that tries to meet up, and probably succeeds, the needs from the ever growing mobile workforce within the Enterprise. Take, for instance, the case of IBM, where 40% of the total population is mobile!
I am sure that in its due time there would be many other technologies and tools that would be adding similar functionality, but right now it looks like Socialtext is actually leading the pack of Enterprise wiki software for the entire workforce, whether you work from the office or while on the road (i.e. Disconnected). Exciting times ahead for knowledge workers as we are now able to collaborate offline in an effective way without having to figure out if at the end of the day we would be able to find a live Internet connection or not in order to share your knowledge with others. Now we would be able to update that content, wait till we get our hands in a reliable connection and sync back! As easy as that! … Let’s see how long before others join …
(Still trying to figure out what a wiki is. Here are some additional links for you to dive into)
