I have written about PBworks before (see PBwiki Adds Four New Features and Changes Its Name to PBworks) and recently caught up again with Chris Yeh, their VP of Marketing.  We discussed their new Real-Time Collaboration Update. It includes integrated instant messaging, live notifications, live editing, and voice collaboration.  We went over each one but first I asked about their micro-messaging capability that was part of the prior release.

I have seen many collaboration suites move to integrate Twitter-like capability and think this is a good trend so I was interested in their version.  Moving micro-messaging inside the enterprise raises new options and PBworks takes advantage of this. There is one universal message stream but you can choose to filter it by selecting followers (Twitter-style) or follow the whole stream.  This supplies real time awareness and near real time connections.  Here is a sample personal home page with the micro-messaging status update field.

If you want to engage in more direct and real time connections with a limited audience, the IM function addresses this need. It is like traditional IM except that it is integrated into the PBworks collaboration suite. IM Collaboration allows users to see who else in their organization is actively using PBworks at that moment, and enables them to send them instant messages from within the product. It is not designed to replace an organization’s current IM but instead provide messages in context and allows for sending links to any pages being discussed within PBworks.  This is a good transition to live editing.

Live editing provides real time communication of editing like Google Wave. I asked Chris if they introduced this before Google Wave. He said they had been thinking about it before they learned of Google Wave but it was released after the release of Wave. This actually worked to their advantage as it made it easier to convey the capabilities by saying it was like Google Wave. Some of the differences include holding an IM session during a live editing session. You would not want to have comments appear on the edited document during the editing session, as that would become part of the document. This way you can have a side channel for discussion while editing that does not impact the editing itself.  You can also hold a voice collaboration session during the live editing as an alternative side channel. I really like this integrated capability. It speaks well of collaboration suites as opposed to separate applications. Here is sample screen showing live editing in progress.

Voice collaboration allows for audio web conferencing. The difference from traditional web conferencing is the integrated capability. You can easily start a live audio session from with PBworks without going through the usual startup activity associated with most web conferencing tools. This means it will likely be used more often and for small incremental sessions as a project evolves. Traditional real-time collaboration tools are generally standalone products for “appointment” collaboration. The PBworks voice collaboration serves a different function for ongoing discussions. There is also automated recording and storage of recorded sessions. Here is sample voice collaboration startup screen.

Live Notifications alerts users to activity within their organization in real-time, rather than requiring them to await an asynchronous email notification. Users can select which notifications they want to receive, based on their preferences (known as “starring” or “following” particular pages) and other users, and the system will stream relevant notifications to whatever page a user is viewing. Here is a sample live notifications screen.

I think this a great collection of real time collaboration tools to complement their other asynchronous tools.  I only wish these capabilities were around when I was managing large-scale efforts.