PBWorks - business wiki in real-time

Today we more and more often hear the new term - "unified collaboration". This is the new logical step after "unified communications" and means that collaboration and communication tools are integrated. The pioneer in this movement is PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) - an enterprise wiki service. Today they announced four new features for communications and collaboration in real-time: messenger, live notifications, real-time, editing, voice conferencing. Interesting, that after that PBWorks positions itself, as the Google Wave alternative. But, while Google Wave is an attempt to re-think the concept of individual communication, PBWorks is built around corporate networks and project workspaces, and
coordinating and managing the activity of a team trying to get work
done.

IM Collaboration



In the right sidebar, that was quite empty, now there is co-workers list with their online status indication. The internal messenger looks like GTalk and allows to hold group chat meetings.

Live Notifications



As a rule notifications (for example about wiki-page changes or new comments) are sent by email or added to RSS stream. Now there is an option to receive them instantly in the separate messenger window.

Live Editing



Now you can watch how your co-workers edit a wiki page in real-time, and help them, of course. The communication between co-editors can be organized over IM or voice call.

Voice Collaboration



This feature allows to organize voice calls or conference calls (but only in US). All calls are recorded that is quite useful. The voice calls are also supported by PBWorks iPhone app.

All these new features (except voice collaboration) will be available on November 17 for free in Project Edition (20$/user/month) and Legal Edition (50$/user/month). The voice collaboration tool will be added in early 2010 and probably will be provided for an additional fee.

See also: Top 10 Wiki software