September 23, 2009, 1:20 PM — The last time I mentioned PBworks, the grown up version of early wiki pioneer PBwiki, it had just released some task management tools. The company, still busy, has added two major improvements in the last few months: tools for lawyers and their support teams, and another that amounts to the first intelligent use of social networking for inside businesses.
Does it seem strange wikis would attract lawyers? It seemed strange to PBworks executives, too. Chris Yeh, vice president of marketing said, “We discovered employees in about 24 of the top 25 law firms were using PBworks, either the paid or free version. So we looked into that market more closely.”
Already big on templates for general use, such as To Do lists, document directories, schedules, project trackers, employee directories and more, PBworks created a comprehensive set for legal use. Each template can be modified by a law firm and used to create an unlimited number of unique workspaces.
The new template sections include Case Management, Client Extranet, Deal Room, Legal Knowledgebase and Legal Intranet. Setting up a new workspace for a client or case takes about a minute.
While Pbworks’ Basic Edition is free and the Standard Edition is $8 per user per month, Legal Edition is $50 per attorney per month, but that license covers all the support staff on the attorney's team, such as assistants and paralegals, as well as client contacts. You may have a half dozen people or more drilling down into the same workspace, and it stays at $50 per attorney per month. This includes atypical wiki features such as spook-level encryption and a comprehensive audit log.
PBworks started this pricing model with Project Edition, devised for white collar professionals and their clients and subcontractors, which costs $20 per user per month, after a 30 day free trial (the Legal Edition also has a free trial). The Legal Edition includes all the Project Edition goodies, plus more.
The company also offers Legal Edition free to lawyers for use on pro bono cases. This encourages lawyers to take cases for free and lets them test the tool.
Although helping lawyers who might file more frivolous lawsuits sounds wrong, maybe the Legal Knowledgebase of past cases will help lawyers from making the same mistakes over and over. As Yeh said, “law firms are being pushed to charge by the case, not by the hour, so they're interested in efficiency.”
Speaking of efficiency, why hasn't anyone figured out how to make social networking inside a business pay off? Shouldn't better information about your coworkers make group projects easier to staff? PBworks thinks it has an answer to this problem, and it looks interesting.
The company’s new social collaboration update, a free feature upgrade for Project Edition, focuses on what Yeh calls the “Collaboration Triangle: People, Process, and Product, all surrounding Work.” In other works, to get work done, you have to juggle the people, processes, and products involved. Whether those products are widgets or words and your project is a washing machine or a Web site, keeping track of people and processes requires more time and effort than it should.
Yet a Facebook For Business incarnation won't do the job, because it's about people, not process, product and work. So PBworks put the social networking aspects that makes Facebook popular, like status updates, micro-blogging, and Instant Messaging, into its new social collaboration tools. Even better, it kept e-mail involved.
The secret sauce is tying all the personal information to the projects and tasks. See the tasks, see your coworkers. Drill down into the coworker details if you want, but if not, those details stay out of the way. Yeh says plainly that “social media is only important if it gets work done.”
More than just a listing of coworkers, PBworks let's you find the right coworker coming from any direction. Looking for people with a certain type of experience? You can set up the profile fields to include all the details that are important, such as which instrument they play if you want to put together a company rock band. From the other direction, you can look at certain projects, see who's involved, then drill down to their schedules and work history to see if they'd fit your project.
