Don Park is exploring open source wikis & weblogs and asks how Socialtext's commercial product is differentiated. Without going into too many specifics:
- Simpler and easier to use
- Fully integrated wiki & weblog
- Administration capabilities
- Support for multiple workgroups
- Extensions
- Integration with enterprise systems
- Secure hosted service
- Optional Appliance deployment
- Service & Support
In general, if you have the technical skills and don't mind supporting, extending and administering a wiki within an organization that is tolerant of additional complexity -- then open source is a great option. Open source wikis have served development organizations particularly well. Open source is a good way to pilot wiki use, even if you don't want to support it yourself.
Commercial software gains natural differentiation because different incentives drive development. Some primary incentives are the need for our solution to co-exist with legacy systems, operate at scale and be easy to use for non-technical users. One of those incentives, developing for markets instead of users, is something Socialtext is turning on its head -- by developing for users first. For enterprise users who are not developers, Socialtext is a great option. For enterprise users who are developers, it's a time vs. money decision.
When Ward invented the wiki and made it open source he fostered more than the countless versions of open source wikis. He enabled a new way for people to work together. We owe a great deal to the open source community for advancing Ward's contributions and for readying the market for a commercial option. Our advisors are leaders in the open source community and we even hired the creator of a great open source wiki and weblog product, kwiki
When we founded Socialtext we made it a core part of our mission to give back to the open source community. Since then we have informed a whole new group of potential business users to both alternatives of Enterprise Social Software. Socialtext enabled many of the great wiki and weblog conversations that developers are having today and fostered new lines of business for consulting practitioners.
We don't compete against open source alternatives, we compliment them.
