Social Glass

Update: Check out Lisa Hoover’s article for some great insight into Versionate (I’m quoted in the last couple of paragraphs).

Versionate, a new wiki tailored toward the enterprise, has just launched and is getting a lot of coverage. When I read about it I quickly headed over to the site and checked out the screencast. Versionate does a lot of things right, namely:

1. Simple, intuitive, easy to use UI
2. Integrated search capability
3. Strong compatibility with MS Office and other products

And it’s point number 3 that really separates Versionate from the competition. Myself and others within the Enterprise 2.0 community have long held that successful collaboration software must play well with MS Office. Knowledge workers will continue to use Word and Excel for years to come - we cannot expect them to abandon these tools immediately (no matter how hard we try). This means collaboration software must compliment the MS Office offering, and Versionate does just that.

Want to create a wiki page? Upload a Word document. Want to edit a wiki page? Edit it in your browser or in Word or in Open Office Writer etc. Want to revert back to a previous version of a document - version control is included and easy to use.

I can see a few features that Versionate could benefit from, however. These include:

1. The use of tags to compliment its folder-like categorization structure
2. Integrated blogging
3. Richer, facebook-like user profiles
4. A downloadable version (as mentioned on Techcrunch) to mitigate data security concerns as the current version follows the SaaS model

In my opinion Versionate is raising the bar for wiki software. I’d expect to see other wiki vendors following Versionate’s “play with MS Office” example in the near future.