cctext: Too Simple or a Smart Fit for the Small Business Market?

Written by Alex Williams / October 13, 2009 3:57 PM / 10 Comments

The wiki market space has transformed over the past few years, with a number of existing players adding social features to stay competitive and be more fully dimensional for users.

But we are starting to wonder how many wiki providers can play in the more established spaces of the market. Perhaps the best potential for emerging vendors is in the small-business market, which is increasingly open to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments.

cctext is a new wiki environment. It joins a number of more robust collaborative products that integrate wikis and social Web technologies. Perhaps there is an opening. Many of the early entrants to the market have moved up the ladder by offering a deeper product.

For instance, Socialtext started as a wiki provider and now offers social networking, social messaging, weblogs, dashboards and distributed spreadsheets. MindTouch calls itself an open-source collaboration engine for the enterprise and the Web. PBWorks operates far deeper in the collaboration space as well. They recently introduced Social Collaboration Update, which in their words "includes social networking-style user profiles, Twitter-style microblogging, and the ability to create wiki pages (with file attachments) just by emailing a single email address."

This trend is an example of how social applications are segmenting. As developers learn to add more pieces of information to their wiki products, the products look more like content management systems than what we have traditionally called wikis.

cctext, for its part, is a straightforward wiki that is counting on its speed and UI to give it a jump in the market.

They may be on to something. Customers do complain about speed. A recent tweet about PBWorks expressed this pretty clearly:

cctext claims its speed comes from its cloud infrastructure. They use Amazon Web Services. We tested cctext and it does appear to be pretty fast when writing, editing and saving information. cctext allows for media uploads that play in the wiki. We uploaded a video. It worked fine but we could not view it. We used a test account so it may have been unviewable for that reason. Overall, cctext is a pretty clean experience. They have a pretty thorough list of features.

All in all, cctext is a wiki that truly is a wiki. It's a basic tool for small business. Cost is $12 per month. The first 10 users are free. cctext integrates with Google Apps. Pricing is the same for the Google Apps version.

Comments

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Alex, thank you for listing Socialtext as one of the established vendors in this market. We agree with your assessment that the small business segment is important. That is why Socialtext offers our platform free for up to 50 people in the same organization. More details can be found here http://www.socialtext.com/products/free50.php

BTW, the PBWork's features you mention "Twitter-style microblogging, and the ability to create wiki pages (with file attachments) just by emailing a single email address" are both available in Socialtext.

Alan - Director of Marketing, Socialtext

Posted by: Alan Lepofsky | October 13, 2009 4:27 PM

Thanks, Adam. You bet. My point: you have a pretty robust product that evolved from a wiki environment. I am sure you have similar features to the other providers. I am pointing out different features of the others to make the distinction between what you are providing, compared to a company like cctext.

Posted by: Alex Williams | October 13, 2009 4:32 PM

Alex,

I think it's definitely true that a stripped-down user experience may be better for some users. I know that I was one of the last die-hards who lobbied for PBworks to keep their original wikistyle text editor, because it was faster than the WYSIWYG editor.

But I do want to stand up for PBworks' response times and reliability. We have a very good track record of performance and reliability, and a lot of that is due to the fact that we control our own datacenter infrastructure, and can apply our expertise to optimizing both software and hardware.

Saying our product is more complex than cctext is certainly true, but it's hard to argue that it's definitely slower based on a single Tweet.

Posted by: chrisyeh | October 13, 2009 5:04 PM

The UI looks simple and great.

Posted by: 布里斯班 | October 13, 2009 7:04 PM

I have used both PBWorks and cctext before, and I saw no appreciable difference in speed between the two. From my perspective, the claim cctext makes to being "the fastest enterprise wiki" simply isn't accurate.

Yes, WYSIWYG editing slapped on top of an old markup system can slow down a wiki. But most of the top vendors have invested a lot in their editors, and in many cases rewrote them from the ground up when they moved away from wiki markup.

I think cctext has a very nice user experience for those not bothered by markup. It's one of the most polished newcomers I've seen lately. But to suggest that there are fundamental performance problems with hosted WYSIWYG wikis is just not true.

Alex is 100% correct to point out that many of the successful players in this space have moved on from being "just a wiki." But there are plenty of successful SaaS companies who've stuck with relatively simple wikis as the core of their business: Wikispaces is one example.

Posted by: Steven Walling | October 13, 2009 7:05 PM

Steven - I think it is still important to listen to the users and what they are saying. PBWorks has a long, excellent track record as a vendor. We do not take away from that - they should not be damned for one Twitter remark. I am sure cctext will get its fair share o criticism but for now, the service looks solid. They may just have something with their scaled down approach. But, I do recognize your authority in the wiki space and hoe we can sit down soon over a cup of coffee to discuss the state of the wiki market.

Posted by: Alex Williams | October 13, 2009 8:52 PM

I first took a look at CCText a couple months ago, and was not impressed either as a wiki geek or a business user.

When I tested it out I didn’t find it to be faster at all than good WYSIWYG wikis , though admittedly this may have improved in couple of months that have passed since then.

More importantly, markup is an impediment to use by non-geeks. I asked the people behind CCText directly about it, and apparently they really think markup is in the best interest of the average joe.

On the up side for CCText, I thought it was had great design and overall user experience, which is more than some of the enterprise wikis out there can easily claim. I think things like the markup are huge barriers to overcome, but there’s still plenty of room in the wiki market for a smart newcomer.

Posted by: travel pillow | October 13, 2009 9:00 PM

@Alex

very thank you for reviewing cctext， an new wiki. cctext has just updates to the latest version.

@Alan, Steven, 布里斯班,travel pillow and all other readers

it's our pleasure to if you can try cctext. Your voice about it and other wikis-related comments.

cctext uses UM as its charge unit. One UM can let one user use cctext one month. new account will have 10 UM.

Posted by: stephen | October 14, 2009 5:56 AM

I agree with Steven - WYSIWYG has nothing to with performance, at least in terms of speed. If anything, the regex nightmare that is wiki markup parsing should be slower than simply storing HTML from an editor. Like cctext, EditMe is a smaller player and hosted in the Amazon cloud, which gives EditMe sites great performance. Not being bogged down with hundreds of thousands of free sites has advantages.

I question whether any wiki using markup has a chance at success beyond geeks and diehards. No offense, I'm one myself, but I've found the learning curve is a lot higher than most casual users are willing to put up with.

Posted by: Matt Wiseley | October 15, 2009 6:55 AM

@Steven @Matt Wiseley

Thank you for your concerning and trial. But there may be some misunderstanding. cctext has had a big improvement on speed comparing with others. But fast is not all what cctext has. It is just one performance. and this speed performance improvement is caused by a whole set of tech and design, not just one or two point.

Except of the editor, cctext also looks friendly, and has a good usability. And cctext is also updated to Milestone 8 yesterday. We are very happy to hear your voice about it.

Stephen,from cctext
http://cctext.net/blog/

Posted by: stephen | October 18, 2009 3:07 AM