Content Management Matters ™

With a relationship that was first announced at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit in October last year, it was probably no surprise that Atlassian officially announced their partnership with Microsoft to integrate their Confluence wiki with SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week. Still it's an interesting integration to look closer at. And so we did.

Online collaboration has become a top priority in organizations today as they struggle share information that is contained within a wide range of applications, directories, desktops and people’s minds. According to a recent report, many of these organizations are looking to the wiki to resolve their collaboration issues due to its ability to support unstructured information using a more bottom up approach to information sharing.

But the wiki may not be living up to all the hype and sales pitches from the technology vendors. There are a number of challenges to implementing and supporting wiki-style collaboration and some best practices that you need to consider before moving forward with your wiki implementation.

eTouch Systems, the creators of the SamePage enterprise wiki, have announced the launch of SamePage v3.5. What's to note? They implemented a fully multilingual user interface. The first languages available will be French and Polish, but any number of languages will be provided for customers upon request.

That's not the only new feature. SamePage is all about Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, and this release carries a few goodies that may make your team smile.

In anticipation of what has already been deemed a year of exciting Enterprise 2.0 developments, Cisco/WebEx and California-based enterprise wiki provider eTouch Systems announce the integration of SamePage, an enterprise wiki, into the WebEx Connect collaboration environment.

Newbie to Google, Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot (which Google bought), leaked that Google will be providing Sites capabilities as part of their Google Apps suite sometime in 2008.

The Sites capability will enable a company using the Google Apps product suite to create intranets, extranets and other types of sites (like project tracking) in a collaborative environment.

Bitnami.org has officially been launched, offering free installation stacks for a host of open source packages designed to make the deployment of such packages as Drupal and Joomla! infinitely easier for all.

Today’s distributed systems are drenched in complexity. However, more often than not, there is no clear location for the storage of environmental documentation.

Is the documentation stored on the file/print infrastructure? Sharepoint? QuickPlace? Is the essential information in your documentation close to the people that need it?

It's a season of change at Palo Alto-based wiki startup Socialtext.

The company has just announced its appointment of Eugene Lee as Chief Executive Officer and member of its board. It has also stated that it has closed a Series C funding round of US$ 9.5 million.

The eTouch team have released a new version of their enterprise Wiki platform today. Highlights of the update include greater support for internationalized content and an import function which will migrate content from your old Wiki, or from HTML sources, straight into your spanking new SamePage Wiki.

Enterprise Web content management developer Day Software has launched Communiqué Advanced Collaboration (CQ AC), a Web 2.0 collaboration tool aimed at managing social media. The new collaboration technology integrates with the company's existing Communiqué Web CMS, and incorporates a host of nifty features run off an impressive-sounding Java driven, JSR-compliant bedrock.

Understanding that a vendor has to do more than just label its WCM solution industry-leading, FatWire goes the acquisition route and adds the extensive Web 2.0 capabilities of the relativelly obscure Infostoria.

Don't we all know that collaborative content is the name of the game? As of the advent of Web two-dot-oh, anyway.

"Despite the hype, we've learned that most large institutions are still not using wikis yet," mused Aniruddha Gadre, CEO of eTouch.

There have been a number of posts recently regarding the validity and role of wikis as an information delivery vehicle in a corporate setting. Part of the concern is the unregulated nature of how a wiki works. Because a public wiki includes user generated content, there is very little control over what gets posted by whom, when and how.

It’s been almost a year since Google acquired JotSpot, a publishing and collaboration company founded in 2004 by the Excite.com co-founders.

Since the announcement, new customer registration has not been allowed and the service has gone stagnant.

But recent whispering on the Web points toward Google re-launching the wiki service sometime in the near future.

MindTouch's funky-fresh Deki Wiki is back, this time with 100 new features.

What are they? Name it (Mashable valiantly tried): Google Analytics for stat-checking, Gabbly online chat, Yahoo Finance stock trackers, Flickr slide shows, Digg It badges. Looks like the mash-up stick hit the open source Deki Wiki group hard.

The service is "free for unlimited users, unlimited pages, and without limitations" (their words), but you can buy varying degrees of support for anywhere between US$ 495 and US$ 4,495.

Witness the frivolity for yourself.