Network Computer Wiki review

Just wanted to point out this very nice article from Network Computing reviewing four enterprise wikis: Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Confluence. I say 'very nice' because they picked Confluence as the best of the pack.

You can read for yourself why. But the article is pretty thorough and seemed to be mostly accurate from what I know of Confluence and the other products.

However, there were a few glaring errors in the article, like this one: "JotSpot is extensible, but only through 13 add-ons available in the vendor's application gallery," which completely misses the point of what JotSpot is trying to do. I'm sure that was frustrating to them.

The reviewer brings up the scalability question, but fails to address it in any meaningful way, though he does manage to call Confluence "limited."

Other interesting info: $250k/year for the Socialtext appliance? Wow. I hadn't seen that number before. Even if you figure that in typical enterprise software sales fashion, they'll immediately drop the price by 50% once you start negotiating, thats still a lot of money.

The reviewer really liked JotSpot's permissions system, I'm guessing because it is fully hierarchical as opposed to Confluence, in which only the view-and-edit page permissions are hierarchical. In practice, I think you can achieve the same results with Confluence's system (plus having the additional power of space-level permissions), but it's not as immediately obvious that this is so.

I haven't played with CustomerVision's wysiwyg editor yet, but the reviewer really liked it. Here's the only screenshot I could find. It's hard to tell much. I need to check it out in action.

This is the first non-blog article I know of that has done a real, hands-on review with all of these products. It's definitely worth a read.

Disclaimer: In case anyone doesn't know, I work for Atlassian Software, makers of Confluence.