Office wiki

Zoho on Wednesday introduced Zoho Wiki, adding joint Web page authoring to its online productivity suite. According to the Zoho company blog, the free product includes an editor for making wikis and the ability to set up groups of people who can access and edit wikis. It is integrated with Zoho's single sign-on capability and users can embed objects, such as spreadsheets, created with Zoho's other applications. Zoho has one of the most complete offerings of Web-based suites, with productivity applications for editing online documents and presentations as well as project planning and management. It competes with several other "Web Office," or " ***

Google has acquired wiki service JotSpot (see news story.) Jotspot is one of a few wikis that's easier to write in than the first generation of wikis. Early wikis required you to write your links and formatting in wiki code, which is quite straightforward, but also quite different from standard HTML and from working with a WYSIWYG word processor, like Word or Google Docs. The newer WYSIWYG wikis (WYSIWikis?) make creating a group document almost as easy as working in a word processor. Which begs the question: Where does a word processor end and a wiki begin? Google Docs is already a great collaborative editing tool. It even has a revisions history function, like most wikis do. ***

As much as we love the concept behind wikis, we've often wondered how they will fare when they grow from adolescence to adulthood. (Translation: Can they make money?) It's not that that we're obsessed with greenbacks, but we've been down this road before and tend to be a tad skeptical when people say "trust me." And other than advertising, we've yet to see an obvious business strategy for the wiki world. ***