PBwiki provides a collaboration platform in three flavors: business, academic, and personal. They recently released improved document management capabilities with PBwiki 2.0. With this move, PBwiki brings wiki simplicity to document management, including unlimited storage for business customers. The emphasis is on ease of use and greater accessibility to documents for employees, vendors, partners, and customers, both inside and outside the firewall.

In summary, the upgrade allows for improved organization and access control; offers the ability to automatically capture, store, and organize file revisions; provides a cohesive interface for managing both wiki pages and files; and allows for easy searching within documents and wiki pages and the easy upload of multiple files at once. PBwiki extends the traditional flat structure of wikis with the concept of virtual folders.  These folders allow companies to better organize wiki content for different groups within the enterprise.

I spoke with Chris Yeh, their VP of Enterprise Marketing about the upgrade. He said they have two major themes with this effort: ensuring ease of use and providing a development platform for business process.  They spent a lot of effort on the usability front. As we both agreed, a tool that is too hard to use is worthless.  This can be the single biggest obstacle to adoption and I have seen the power of this barrier many times.

Like many in the enterprise space, they are looking to replace email with attachments as the major means to share documents. PBwiki has rightly recognized that to be successful in this goal, they have to overcome business user inertia. The basic user interface has been redesigned based on a year’s worth of user feedback to present a more professional, polished appearance. They have also made it much easier for users to customize the look for their company.

In another move to make business people more comfortable with an enterprise 2.0 tool, the new PBwiki is more user-centric, rather than wiki-centric.  In contrast to the traditional model of the freely editable public wiki, organizations can have a robust system of individual user accounts to maintain accountability and control.  Rather than focusing on many different wikis, PBwiki lets the individual log into a single user account that centralizes access to his or her various wikis.

Chris said that they want to balance simplicity with the need to meet individual company business requirements by opening up their APIs to make PBwiki a development platform.  This allows firms to create custom applications to better integrate PBwiki with their specific business processes.

Chris provided the use case example of RD2, a Texas web design firm that builds online communities for clients like Southwest Airlines, Hotels.com, and Verizon. They have integrated PBwiki with the client facing business process. Each new effort is launched and managed through a new PBwiki page.  This allows for more efficient client involvement in reviews and other project discussions. RD2 found this was a dramatic improvement over email, the prior collaboration method.  Here are more details on the RD2 case example.  It is the classic example of enterprise 2.0 transformation and one more validation for using open collaboration platforms.

I asked Chris about the three flavors: business, academic, and personal. The business version is the more comprehensive offering with strong security, single sign-on, and the other features that appeal to both enterprise IT and users.  The academic version has some unique features that support an educational environment, such as the ability to create accounts for users without email accounts.  The personal version is free.  Each of these offerings come through the cloud.

PBwiki has The Daily Peanut operating as their official blog.  It has been going since August 2006 with regular posts and has a tip of the week category.  Chris said they are also making extensive use of Twitter to communicate with both customers and analysts.  Twitter, itself, uses a PBwiki API to publish their documentation.