First Look

Wikis (Hawaiin for "quick") are giving a new burst to personal publishing -- and are now quickly gaining traction in the enterprise space as an effective collaborative tool.

A recent alliance between an enterprising domain name connoisseur and a proven technology company could accelerate both trends. Last month, John Gotts paid $2.86 million for the wiki.com domain name, and two weeks ago, he announced a deal with Mindtouch Systems to provide the back-end technology to power what he hopes will be a million new wikis within a year.

"It's a fast, quick way to get your own Web site up," said Gotts. "Like MySpace, it's a way that people can come together and share their knowledge," for fun or profit.

"Enterprises can now look to wikis to be not just not just an experiement, but a serious business tool," said Mark Kurtz, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Mindtouch. Kurtz described how companies can start deploying wikis at a department level and then scale them to the enterprise level.

Mindtouch's DekiWiki Open Source solution -- which requires a $2,995 appliance -- can be deployed in 15 minutes, added Kurtz, who described real-world collaboration scenarios that provided a diminshed reliance on email, less vulnerability to spam and viruses -- and greater visibility into enterprise functions and feedback for all company employees.

Kurtz himself became a convert when managing four separate offices via DekiWiki before he joined Mindtouch.

"It allowed us to not rely on email as much; we could see upates instantly, see that documents had been updated and review each other's work without relying on email threads," Kurtz said.

"What that meant for productivity was the we got 17 proposals out the door instead of 11," he noted.