JotSpot's Hybrid Wiki/Office Suite - 3 New Apps Launched
To further Read/WriteWeb's
continuing look at the Web Office space, I spoke again recently with Joe Kraus - CEO of
JotSpot. What started out as a wiki company, is slowly
but surely morphing into a Web Office suite contender. Although JotSpot does not actually
position itself in that way - they're positioned as a kind of wiki/office hybrid, which
we discuss in detail in this post. Also JotSpot has just released 3 new features, which
are outlined below.
Back in July, JotSpot released its 2.0 version. It was described by Joe Kraus at that point as "wikis meets Microsoft Office". The upgrade enabled JotSpot users to collaborate on different types of "office-like" products. Its spreadsheet product, Tracker, was integrated into their core wiki product - along with calendars, File Cabinets, Photo Pages.
New Features
In the latest release of JotSpot, more apps have been added to their application gallery: group directory, forum and To Do Lists. Nothing revolutionary there, but it beefs up their Office Suite credentials a bit more. This screenshot from their Applications Gallery page shows the latest list of office (aka productivity) apps:
Page Type Model
These are all "Page Types", which basically means different types of productivity applications presented as Wiki pages. The theory behind this, Joe told me, is that all the Page Types "have this wiki-esque properties - they're group editable, they're immediately collaborative, they have the same access control model on top of them."
Hybrid Wiki/Office
Joe said to me that although JotSpot still positions itself as a wiki nowadays - they don't necessarily see themselves in that space in 5-10 years. But he said the metaphor of wikis still has appeal to people, as a representation of the Web's shift from a monolog to a dialog - aka the read/write web! JotSpot then is about "bringing the familiarity that people have with office [software] and bringing the Wiki metaphor to that." In essence, bringing the 'dialog' and collaboration features of wikis into the office environment.
The reason JotSpot is positioning itself as something different than a straight Web Office Suite (with word processing, spreadsheets, etc) is that Joe believes Microsoft itself will eventually position itself in that market. They don't want to compete with them with that positioning - hence the wiki/office hybrid vision which JotSpot has, which approaches the space from a different angle. JotSpot's strategy is to "embrace and extend the space" (more on that in an earlier interview I did with Joe).
I completely agree with Joe that Web Office startups need to do things differently and more Web native than Microsoft (and Google). Indeed that's the topic I spoke about in my recent Office 2.0 Podcast Jam podcast.
Screenshots of new JotSpot features
To conclude, here are screenshots of the latest new JotSpot Page Types:
Group Directory
Forum
To Do List
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JotSpot's in a pretty good position in this market, an dI like their strategy of trying to expand the market. I've written a piece on them and some of their competitors.
Posted by: Nick Lothian | October 16, 2006 4:50 AM
It's interesting to see Wiki and web based office spaces merging. Writely was also a very wiki like application. I think web based office approach is better, wiki is too geekish, no need to wiki syntax, wysiwyg editor should be enough for everything.
And AFAIK, Wikio was the first to introduce wiki like spreadsheets functionality. I liked this innovation, good to see this expands. And it's a good way for differentiating yourself in the highly competitive and crowded wiki space.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 16, 2006 1:12 PM
I like the JotSpot product very much. However, I think they should be careful to put a lof of effort into making the current offering more reliable. It is indeed nice to have all these new apps integrated, but optimizing what it already there, fixing the basics, is more important. I am just talking as a user of their $70/month package. For instance, you still cannot have two pages with the same name in your wiki. Hello? There is a fundamental architectural flaw here. Also, image insertion in a page is just horribly designed. And so forth.
Posted by: Jean-Michel Decombe | October 16, 2006 2:46 PM
Jean-Michel, this is a design decision in software engineering. You may sometimes prefer horizontal development over the vertical one because of some special/economic reasons. But I agree, this should not be the case in a paid product which is targeting enterprise consumers. We also prefered horizontal development in Grou.ps but got bad feedback about it, but our users don't pay anything at least.
By the way, I didn't test what you claim here, this was based on your comments.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 16, 2006 5:36 PM
Jean-Michel,
Most wiki's share this same quality of not allowing two pages with the same name in a wiki.
As Emre suggested, its an architecture "thing" that is difficult to convert at a later date.
While I'm sure there are wiki's that support duplicate page names in a single wiki, I can't think of any nor do I know of any.
Anyone?
Posted by: Isaac Garcia | October 22, 2006 4:17 PM