wiki

PBworks 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.

LiquidPlanner is adding more collaboration tools to its online project management application because people, not tasks, create most of the problems in project management. And PBworks is adding task management tools to its wiki (originally PBwiki) because when people collaborate, they usually have shared tasks to accomplish.

With the growing popularity of enterprise 2.0, many organizations are increasingly willing to grant employees a common platform upon which to collaborate and contribute and share ideas. Wikis are often touted as such a platform that is easily launched and to which employees will flock to contribute ideas, but they can prove difficult to get off the ground if not done properly.

Socialtext, a Web 2.0 vendor that has sold social software (primarily wikis) to businesses for internal collaboration and knowledge management, officially launched Socialtext People (enterprise social networking profiles) and Socialtext Signals, an application that allows business users to share short messages (in 140 characters or less) inside the enterprise like consumers do on Twitter, the microblogging service.

You know something is Enterprise 2.0 when you see it. Blogs and wikis, yes; Email, no ... Social networking, yes; Rolodexes, no ... Open-source, yes; Closed-source, no ... AJAX/RIA, yes; HTML forms/Static websites, no. So why is it still such an elusive concept?

As Wikipedia grew in popularity, becoming the eighth most visited site on the Web, many companies decided to purchase and build wikis internally to help enable better communication, knowledge sharing, collaboration and project management between employees. There are several free Web 2.0 offerings which help users who are new to wikis get their feet wet without installing software on a computer. We take a look at a four of them here: