After a lengthy post yesterday about TEC’s internal use of a corporate wiki, I read an announcement today from TWiki about the launch of its enterprise wiki service TWIKI.NET. TWiki is a venerable open source wiki system, with a huge quantity of interesting and useful plugin functionality. The company’s press release says
“TWIKI.NET will provide premium support to a tested, reliable and secure version of TWiki. “We’re adding a professional company to a proven software platform so Fortune 500 companies and organizations of all sizes can feel safe, supported and secure while also accessing the innovation and flexibility of the TWiki solution,” added Beckström.”
Looks like they’re taking one of the common open source business models in hand, providing services to ensure dependability, upgrades, security, features, etc. A few years ago wikis seemed to be the little booth in the corner at trade shows, without a huge amount of people paying attention to why these would be useful in an enterprise context. Persistence seems to be paying off as these wikis continue to mature and gain acceptance, and most seem to be growing from their open source seeds. The list includes SocialText, Atlassian’s Confluence, XWiki, DekiWiki, and a lot of others.
One other thing of note, TWIKI.NET has a page with brief reasons why companies use an enterprise wiki–lots of interesting reasons.