Top 10 Wiki and Collaborative document editors

Latest news about Wiki and Collaborative document editors

2021. Notion acquires India’s Automate.io in push to accelerate product expansion



Notion has acquired Automate.io, an Indian startup that builds connectivity and integrations with over 200 services, as the workplace productivity startup looks to accelerate its product expansion to become more compelling for tens of millions of individuals and businesses that are increasingly moving to digital collaborative tools. Automate will help Notion understand the know-how of — and leverage — the 200 integrations the Indian startup has developed to give users and enterprises alike the ability to bring their workflows into Notion.


2021. Collaborative iOS app Craft Docs secures $8M



Craft Docs app — which was built from the ground up as an iOS app for collaborative documents — has secured an $8 million Series A. Currently available on iOS, iPadOS and MacOS, Craft now plans to launch APIs, extended integrations and a browser-based editor in 2021. It has aspirations to become a similar product to Notion. CEO Balint Grosz says “Notion is very much focused around writing and wikis and all that sort of stuff. We have a lot of users coming from Notion, but we believe we have a better solution for people, mainly for written content. Notion is very strong with its databases and structural content. People just happen to use it for other stuff. So we are viewed as a very strong competitor by our users, because of the similarities in the product. I don’t believe our markets overlap much, but right now from the outside people do switch from Notion to us, and they do perceive us as being competitors.”

2021. Atlassian peps up Confluence with new graphical design features



Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace, has been around for more than 15 years, and is often a core knowledge-sharing tool for the companies that implement it. Today’s update brings to the service features like cover images, title emojis and customizable space avatars (that is, “icons that denote a ‘space’ or section of Confluence”). The team also recently introduced smart links, which allow you to paste links from services like YouTube and Trello and have the service immediately recognize them and display them in their native format. Other new features include the ability to schedule when a new page is published and the ability to convert pages to blog posts (because, as it turns out, Atlassian has seen a bit of a resurgence in corporate blogging — mostly for internal audiences — during the pandemic).


2020. Online workspace startup Notion raises $50M



Online workspace startup Notion has raised $50 million in new funding on a $2 billion valuation. Founded in 2016, Notion offers an all-in-one workspace that includes support for notes, tasks, wikis and databases. Pitched as blending everyday work apps into one, the service is designed for task and project management. In the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Notion’s support for remote workers helped seal the round. The company is said to have seen record levels of new customer sign-ups in the last few weeks as much of the world is forced to work from home.Remote working has exploded in 2020 alongside COVID-19. Companies across the board that provide remote working tools have seen large boost in numbers.


2020. Atlassian’s Confluence gets a new template gallery



Confluence, Atlassian’s content-centric collaboration tool for teams, is making it easier for new users to get started with the launch of an updated template gallery and 75 new templates. The update goes to show that Confluence has evolved from a niche wiki for technical documentation teams to a tool that is often used across organizations today. The new template gallery will make it easier to find the specific template that makes sense for your business, with new search tools, filters and previews that you can find in the right-hand panel of your Confluence site.


2016. Social knowledge base MindTouch gets $12 Million



MindTouch, a cloud service that helps customers find answers to product questions using the company’s existing documentation, training materials and customer service documents, announced $12 million in funding after years of bootstrapping. What they do is take a company’s existing documentation and other materials and put it to work online where customers can access it and use it. They do this by breaking the content into small chunks and extracting metadata to make it searchable online. They then combine that with machine learning to organize logical learning paths through the materials. The end result is that it makes it easier for customers to search for and find the information they need without having to call customer service.


2014. Workplace messaging app Cotap now lets you text documents from Box, Dropbox and others



Cotap, the startup that wants to become “WhatsApp for the workplace“ is going beyond mobile messaging and moving into file sharing, with integrations with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive; adding web and desktop apps (native to Mac first) to use Cotap when you are not on a smartphone or tablet; and releasing updated mobile apps for iOS and Android. Cotap was founded last year by former Yammer executives and recently passes 10,000 business customers that typically range from between 50 and 100 employees and include businesses like Philz Coffee and the Hyatt chain of hotels.


2014. Google Wave is back. Via Sandstorm



4 years ago Google closed the next-gen collaborative messaging service Google Wave and passed the code on to the Apache project, which quietly developed it further, but in a way that meant users need to run their own server. Now Wave is back in easy-to-use (SaaS) form, for those that want it. The rather exciting Sandstorm project, which is building a “personal cloud platform” that can be hosted for regular users or self-installed by techie types, has ported Wave onto that platform. That means Sandstorm users can now install Wave with a click and start collaborating with friends and colleagues without needing to set up a server.


2014. Box Notes is available on Android



Box updated its Android app and added the lightweight document editor Box Notes to it. With the latest version of Box for Android, you’ll be able to create, view and edit Box Notes just like you do on the web. Box Notes on Android features seamless integration into the native menus, allowing for all the basic editor features you’d expect: cut, copy, paste, bold, italic, underline, bullet list, numbered list, indent and outdent. Besides, it’s now possible to create checklists using Box Notes (on the web and in mobile apps) and the interface is translated to all of supported languages. The Box for Android update also comes with a ton of additional new features to enhance your productivity, including recently opened files, advanced settings for shared URLs and fine-grained admin controls.


2011. Google wants to mobilize business sites


For those businesses that still don't realize that the great majority of their customers coming (or would like to come) to their site via smartphones, Google launched the new initiative GoMo. This service allows you to see how your site looking in the mobile browser and find an appropriate service for building mobile site version (Google Sites is also in the list). Who should think about the mobile site version? First of all, it's online stores. Because browsing stores on a smartphone - is the most popular activity among those sitting in a toilet. Second, that are local businesses: cafes, restaurants, hotels, shops, medical services, hair salons, car repair ... - all the things that city visitor or local inhabitant may need. ***


2011. JIRA, Confluence available as SaaS services


Atlassian has launched the new SaaS service Atlassian OnDemand, which includes its popular tools for managing software development projects: JIRA (issue-tracker), Confluence (wiki), GreenHopper (Agile Project Management), Bonfire (bug reporter), FishEye (code manager), Crucible (code review) and Bamboo (integration). All products in the SaaS version provide the full functionality of the installable counterparts. There are only minimal restrictions on the tool integration and use of the custom plug-ins. You can turn on/off the tools as needed. The service pricing is traditional for Atlassian - "everything for $10 for 10 users." Recall that the company is also selling the 10-user leniences of the same installable products for $10. So you can either buy the product for $10, or rent it for $10/month. ***


2010. Cisco Quad - enterprise social software + video



Late last year, Cisco introduced the social intranet system with a long name Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform and this solution hit the Top 10 Enterprise 2.0 products in 2009 by ReadWriteWeb. Now Cisco starts selling the system under the new name - Cisco Quad. The functionality of the system at first glance seems to be traditional for enterprise social software: user profiles, personal start pages, microblogs and communities (for group collaboration). But of course, Cisco added to the system its main feature - video. From anywhere in the system, where user's avatar appears, you can see his online status, send him an instant message or start a video conference. And, of course, Cisco Quad is closely integrated with Cisco Webex web conferencing service and Cisco Unified Communications . ***


2010. Zoho Wiki comes to Enterprise



Although Zoho is positioned as a SaaS vendor for small business, it doesn't forget about the enterprise customers. The new features in Zoho Wiki 2.0 primarily target large companies. First of all, that are workspaces, which are useful for creating separate wikis for company departments. Each workspace has its own administration panel, security settings and appearance (customizable at CSS level). The access control system (which is also actual for large companies) was dramatically improved. Now you can set the detailed access rights at page, workspace or wiki level for employees, user groups, domains or customers. ***


2009. MindTouch - Anti Social Software



(Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch CEO) ***


2009. 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 ***


2009. Windows 7 - cloud-native OS



Yesterday Windows 7 was officially released. Of course, it's a very important event for IT users and professionals, but we, first of all, wondered about how this new OS could influence the Cloud Computing sphere.  And though, at first sight, it has nothing in common with the Cloud, there are some technical aspects that make Windows 7 (in combination with its server counterpart Windows Server 2008 R2) the first cloud-native OS from Microsoft. The fact is that the Windows-based IT infrastructure highly depend on two key components: Active Directory (for network administration) and Network Access Protection (for network security). Until Windows 7 both these technologies didn't work if server was located in the Cloud (on remote server) but not in Local Area Network. ***


2009. Social Software leaders: Jive, SocialText and NewsGator



Social Software adopts consumer web achievements (wikis, blogs, profiles, tags, ratings, social connections, people search, micro-blogging) in the enterprise environment. Of course, today almost all software vendors say that their software provides social computing, but in most cases it's only PR pitches and their software is not really social. At the same time there are few "native social software" solutions, that provide a social layer for company intranet and really enable it to achieve the social software objectives: create enterprise-wide community and improve collaboration. The most successful on this market are 3 solutions: Jive SBS, SocialText and NewsGator Social Sites. ***


2009. Google Sites takes on Sharepoint (Seriously)



As was promised by Data Liberation Front, Google opens access to the data stored inside its intranet-service Google Sites. It's implemented in a form of Google Sites API. So, from now, users shouldn't worry that they can't backup or import their data in a suitable format. But "data liberation" is not the main reason why Google Sites API was created. It's rather a necessary move to survive. Because Google is developing all these business tools not to make money, but to compete with Microsoft and to draw its attention from the search/advertising market. And if Google Sites doesn't rival its antipode - Sharepoint, it has a chance to be dismissed. ***


2008. SocialText wiki platform gets collaborative spreadsheets



Corporate Wiki software company SocialText is adding a spreadsheet to its wiki product. The new feature, SocialCalc, allows users to collaborate on spreadsheets the same way they do in the company's text-based Wikis. The product is based on Dan Bricklin's open-source Wikicalc. For spreadsheet jockeys this is both good and bad news. SocialCalc spreadsheets inherit wiki-style revision tracking, which is an automatic audit trail that will arguably be even more important on spreadsheets with financial and other hard data on them than it is on text-based wiki pages. Users can also easily embed data from other SocialCalc sheets in their spreadsheets, or for that matter data from any SocialText wiki page or Web URL. This could make building workgroup-wide, or even company-wide spreadsheets possible. Assuming, that is, everyone in said workgroup or company is comfortable using SocialCalc instead of Excel.


2008. Google launches Google Sites



Wikis (like Wikispaces) can be incredibly useful. But for some reason collaborating groups haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet. It’s no surprise that Google wanted to be a player in this space with their acquisition of Jotspot in 2006. We’ve been patiently waiting to see how Google would finally make wikis relevant and approachable to the every day user. The application is the first Google service deployed exclusively for Google Apps. Anyone who has ever created or edited a Google Doc will feel right at home in Google Sites. Users do not need to know any markup language to edit pages, one of the biggest drawbacks of most wiki applications. Google Sites borrows the familiar WYSIWYG toolbar from Google Docs. Similar to Google Docs, you can opt to share your Google Sites within your company, with the world or not at all. The entire application environment is clean and straightforward, and not at all intimidating to those who have never edited a site before.


2006. Google buys JotSpot



Google has acquired the wiki service JotSpot. JotSpot is one of a few wikis that is 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, such as Word or Google Docs. The newer WYSIWYG wikis like Basecamp's Writeboard make creating a group document almost as easy as working in a word processor. Microsoft and other productivity suite companies, such as Zoho and Thinkfree, will have to figure out how to respond. Microsoft will have the most trouble, as long as it clings to its installed base of Office software users.