Wikis are great innovation for the web and provide a useful platform for collaborative content creation. I have used them in a number of different situations where wikis made possible things that were very difficult before, such as gaining group consensus online for content when both the structure and details were shifting. This potential has caused people to look beyond this initial function to broader applications such as the company intranet (e.g., Enterprise Wiki Increases Collaboration and Connections at Janssen-Cilag).

The broader application of wikis is one of the goals of Deki Wiki. I recently spoke with Aaron Fulkerson, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at MindTouch, the firm that provides Deki Wiki. MindTouch was founded in 2005. Aaron and Steve Bjorg, Co- Founder and Chief Technology Officer both came out of Microsoft. Deki Wiki is a free open source wiki and application platform for communities and enterprises. Like some of the other open sources providers, MindTouch makes it money on services and support. They have designed Deki Wiki for ease of use and to provide a comprehensive platform for authoring, aggregating, organizing, and sharing content. Deki Wiki is also a platform for creating collaborative applications, or adding wiki capabilities to existing applications.

The first release of Deki Wiki occurred in 2005. It was built on the popular open source MediaWiki, is the wiki behind Wikipedia. Today, there’s almost no MediaWiki code remaining in Deki Wiki , as MindTouch has continued to upgrade it. In July 2007, they offered a new platform for Deki Wiki. Aaron mentioned that Deki Wiki has now become the most popular vendor-backed wiki, with more than 1,000 downloads a day. MediaWiki is still the overall leader in downloads with about 500,000 a month. So far Deki Wiki’s awareness has spread purely by word-of-mouth, but they have just started to be more active in their marketing outreach to expand beyond their current user base and reach general business users.

If wikis are to make it with the general business users, they have to become easier to use. There is too much code and not enough wysiwyg in most wikis. This is something the MindTouch people have focused on to expand business use. I watched a demo and you do not have to see the standard wiki text. It seemed as easy as MS Office applications. It is also easy to see the history of pages and compare old and new versions. A track changes like visualization brings differences to the foreground.

You can also open MS Office documents within the wiki. Mind Touch has also made it easy to use the wiki for file storage, along with notes about the documents. This was one of the applications that excited me the most as it makes it easier to use the wiki in an intranet capacity. In this function, the wiki becomes the glue that holds the content together and not simply a vehicle for single document development. Aaron said that around 1,000 firms are now using Deki Wiki in an intranet function. You can also provide context for content from the web through a feature that automatically draws relevant content from sources such as RSS feeds, Google Maps, Google News, and Twitter.

Deki Wiki allows for mashup development. You can develop templates that enable the business user to more easily put these mashups together. I saw the creation of a Google Map – Windows Live Contacts mashup that provided a map of where everyone was located. IBM QED Wiki can also do this, but Deki Wiki is a free open source platform. I am pleased that more vendors like MindTouch are looking for better business applications of Web 2.0 tools and are keeping the non-technical business user, like me, in mind. They also have a useful blog to provide the on-going context for Deki Wiki.