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The Wikification of Office

In most organizations even the most basic collaboration still has yet to be realized. Specifically I am discussing documents, which outside of email is how most business communication still takes place. Personally I live in Microsoft Outlook and Word with a fair amount of Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio.

Many people believe that traditional office tools will soon be replaced by online Web Office solutions. However, I believe that new collaboration technologies will open up traditional office tools to better facilitate sharing and updating information with teams - and that tools like web-processors, blogs and wikis will augment but not replace traditional productivity tools. I call this the "Wikification of Office." Building collaborative services around Office is one of our aims with Ingeniux Cartella, our new Social Software platform that will be released this fall.

As a self-stated Web 2.0 guy - I have tried a whole range of Web Office tools. Some are more promising than others. Adobe Buzzword in particular is exciting and has good performance and editing tools.

Yet despite promising solutions, the Web Office is still not office-ready. I have experimented with bringing tools like Google Docs and Wikis into core parts of our business. We have drafted shared product and marketing planning documents using these tools. The results have been less than stellar and in every case we have rolled back to Good ‘Ol Microsoft Office. Office has stronger formatting, change management and editing capabilities and performs much better with large documents. Our last product marketing requirements document was well over 70 pages with lots of tables, diagrams, and references. It proved way too much to update in a web browser.

I have used Wikis for shared documents as well. Again promising, but the editing tools are arcane. Textile markup - although rewarding once you get the knack - will never be business-ready. As a stand-alone application a Wiki is also just another silo - and one very disconnected from the productivity tools most people work in. However, the notion of a Wiki as open access to content and live editing is clearly powerful and is already influencing other applications as well the whole read/write approach for content management technologies.

Despite the fact that the Web Office is not here, traditional office collaboration process is clearly broken. For most people collaborating on shared documents requires emailing them back and forth, trying to track changes between multiple versions, and invariably getting out of sync or branching. It is very disjointed and error prone. How many times have you emailed a document to someone and then realized moments later you sent the wrong version or an egregious error? I call this feeling SOS (send/oops syndrome).

The other problem with the current document model is that all knowledge and business documents live on personal PC's and email in-boxes, where many knowledge workers spend hours each day redundantly updating or searching for documents.

So perhaps the problem with workplace collaboration is not so much the TOOLS (MS Office), but the PROCESS. The true Wikification of Office may not happen with web 2.0 apps, but with a more central and collaborative process for working with traditional forms of content. Online workspaces with solutions like Cartella provide the ability to have multiple people work off centrally stored documents and provides the collaboration process to make updates easier and content more discoverable.

Similar document collaboration is clearly part of the MS Sharepoint phenomenon, but in my view Sharepoint does not go far enough in making content discoverable or facilitating the community aspects that can really transform collaboration (bringing the people and the documents together online). The Groove folders approach is also supposed to address collaboration, but I have never been able to penetrate Groove and have abandoned my forays.

At Ingeniux we believe that better collaboration solutions can connect people with content and in many ways transform the workplace. Ingeniux Cartella is the result of this vision and over 2 years of prototyping and development. Cartella means "Folder" in Italian and is our new collaboration platform for teams and communities. I am glad to say we have made rapid improvements and our customers are doing some amazing things - from online communities - to academic collaboration - to very cutting edge sales automation. Currently Cartella is in a development sprint and will be generally available this fall.

With Cartella our aim is to turn the collaboration process around and leverage the best of traditional document formats and online collaboration. Among many other features Cartella provides very strong document management and collaboration capabilities.

Before getting too deep in what we have done to address the document collaboration problem with Cartella, let's agree on some basic tenants:

1. Documents are communication. Often this communication is two way. We could say that documents are conversations.

2. Documents store knowledge. The value of the document is making that knowledge available to others.

3. Document change frequently and need to be kept up-to-date between all stakeholders.

4. Documents need to be easy to find. Let's use the word "discoverable."

5. Documents lock-in information" PDF is the ultimate example. But any document is a closed door because it needs to be opened - contrast with a blog post or web page that is readily consumable without opening an application.

Cartella is designed to improve the document collaboration process by addressing these tenants. With Cartella documents may be uploaded to shared workspaces and repurposed based to multiple spaces (the same document may want to be listed in Marketing and Sales for instance or Development and Admissions for that matter). Because documents can be checked-in/out they can be updated and versioned between groups of users. Document spaces also have RSS feeds so I can always see when someone updates a document. The space and related documents can be securely shared, so as I draft versions I can invite users or groups to join me. We can manage projects this way or simply collaborate on a set of documents and content items.

Cartella also makes documents discoverable. Of course document level search is important - but the problem with search is that it is hard to tell if it is the right document until you open it. With Cartella MS Office documents, PDF, and other files are web accessible without downloading or opening. Simply click on the document and you can get a full preview without opening the file. You can also discover documents using tags, folders, and other traditional paths.

If I need to send a document to someone I can attach a "ticket" to the document that can be sent in an email. When the recipient gets the email they can click on a link to view the document online. This feature historically has only been available in big ticket document tools and solves a few large problems, including email file storage and sending size limits, versioning, and compliance/risk/security concerns.

Of course because Cartella also provides integrated blog, wiki, media, and web publishing tools a lot of content that would end up in documents simply gets written as web content to workspaces, making it easier to find, read and update. The key here is that these web 2.0 tools are integrated and actually compliment traditional document content - they do not create disperate silos.

I am excited to start using Cartella in our internal and customer collaboration - and moreover to make it available for other organizations. Solving the document collaboration challenge or Wikification of Office is only one part of Cartella. With Cartella we have also tackled a lot of other big collaboration issues from email to web publishing. But that is for another post. Right now I am just excited to stop emailing my Word documents and start truly collaborating with my team, partners, and customers.

Posted by David Hillis at 10:37 pm