Since we've announced Clearspace, we have had a lot of people ask about its relationship to wikis: Is it a wiki? Does it have a wiki? How does it work with other wikis? Here's a little insight on Clearspace and wikis and how we see them co-existing.

For those of you who don't know what a wiki is (and suprisingly a lot of people still don't know), according to wikipedia: "A wiki is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring."

*Our Approach*

As part of our research, we found that a good portion of our customers have been using wikis for a while and while they love the ease of authoring and collaborative aspects, they didn't love how unstructured, hard to control and how quickly all the content becomes jumbled and lost. Not to mention, they felt that their wikis were a bit too "techie" for the entire company and that there were many administrative and enterprise-performance issues.  Plus they were looking for something bigger than a single point solution. That's why they asked us to incorporate some of the same principles into the structured content systems they were using from us. "Combine a wiki with a knowledge base" was essentially the message -- quick editing, wiki syntax and co-authoring mixed with workflow, metadata and easy navigation.

The Differences

Structure: As mentioned above, this is the main difference between the two. The wiki-style features in Clearspace are meant to build documents, not a website. And the system as a whole is organized around teams, departments, or communities of practice, so it's designed to become an organizational content system--a place where content never hides.

Check out the screenshots below. Before even getting to the wiki functionality, Clearspace organizes and filters content so that people can find the content they're looking for. Note that wiki-documents (the orange "page" icon) is content that coexists with ongoing discussions, new blog posts and uploaded files.

[according to wikipedia|http://www.jivesoftware.com/images/screenshots/devteam.png]

Now, here's a wiki-page. This one has been published and is currently being edited. The wiki portion has the orange background and as you can see, is treated more as a document within the application vs. everything being the wiki (application). We think this will be great as certain wiki-documents could get "template-ized." Sort of like what Notes tried to..cough...do.

[according to wikipedia|http://www.jivesoftware.com/images/screenshots/realtimewiki.png]

Applications: Wikis are great at going deep with application features (application wikis). There's a ton you can do with a wiki and when people need powerful features that build out their wiki-driven websites they'll want to buy a wiki application. We can see a role for them alongside Clearspace. We plan to have Clearspace expose other wiki application's content so that entire companies can use them to find or participate in editing their content.

Process: Clearspace is all about open collaboration. A big part of that is managing the process around collaboration. Clearspace has fantastic, lightweight yet robust workflow for documents, forums, blogs and users/communities. Its goal is to manage these flows of content intelligently and easily (i.e. without becoming a full ECMS) -- relating content, finding users, notifying the right people at the right time, managing the editing process, real-time co-authoring (conferencing), etc. This is much more akin to Sharepoint than Office.

Wiki applications are a very powerful tool for creating collaborative websites quickly among a team and they provide deep application functionality to perform those functions. Clearspace focuses this level of functionality on documents (wiki-docs) as one part of other powerful content like discussions and blogs within the application. Clearspace is meant to manage collaboration workflows and structured information without the overhead of traditional systems. We've been using it internally for a while now and are positively addicted to it.

We really look forward to sharing it with you all in just a matter of weeks. Not to mention the release party. These guys deserve it.

Early on, during one of our Clearspace product development meetings, we (the Clearspace development team) discussed the importance of 'hackable' or 'meaningful' URL's. In other words, if someone sent you a link to a Clearspace blog via IM or email[1|#urls-1], you should be able to figure out a lot about the blog post without viewing it in your browser. So, for example, if my boss Bill sent me an IM that looked like this:

Hey Aaron, check out this blog entry:
http://mysite.com/do/entry?publicid=4B4C0B46DC743154ECB68300531D6A04&token=

I'd probably click on it, but I sure as heck wouldn't know what Bill was sending me too. Is he sending me another link to a blog that discusses the virtues of living in Iowa[2|#urls-2] or is it something work related? I can't tell. If however, he blogged about the link in Clearspace, his IM would look like this:

Hey Aaron, check out this blog entry:
http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/2006/12/19/iowa-jokes/

With only a cursory glance, it should be immediately obvious what this blog post is about (another Iowa joke), when it was posted (December 19th, 2006) and who posted it (Bill).  We can all agree this is 'a good thing', right? Hold on though to your corn husks though, it gets better.

Most blog software products in the wild give up at this point: they answer the question of who, what and why by looking at the URL of a single blog post and that's it. Clearspace, on the other hand, goes the extra mile for you.  Wouldn't it be nice to see a list of all of Bill's posts on the 19th of December?

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/2006/12/19/

or how about all the posts in December?

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/2006/12/

or 2006[3|#urls-3]?

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/2006/

What about all his posts that are tagged with 'iowa'?

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/tags/iowa

Bill's a smart guy, I should subscribe to his blog, I wonder what feeds he has available?

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/feeds

Great, I can subscribe to all of his posts:

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/feeds/posts

and a feed of all of his posts that are tagged with 'iowa':

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/feeds/tags/iowa

but I'd really like those in Atom format rather than the default[4|#urls-4] RSS 2.0 format:

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/feeds/posts/atom

and it would be nice to easily be able to include a list of his posts on the homepage of our intranet:

http://mysite.com/blogs/bill/feeds/posts/json

So there you have it: hackable and meaningful URL's galore.  If you're interested in learning about how we did it, you can read about the gory details over on my blog.

Now if I could just get Bill to stop sending me links about Iowa.

¹You're not using still using email are you?

²If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by, you might live in Iowa. (source)

³Hat tip to Tim Bray for nice way he implemented URL's on his blog.

⁴Yes, you can switch the default to be Atom.

Well, I guess being a featured story on the front page of CNET's News.com, sorta makes it hard to be too stealthy about Clearspace. Check out Martin LaMonica's article about the application (a screenshot of Clearspace is included in his article). It's pretty energizing to be compared to other products from much bigger companies like IBM and Intel.

It was also interesting to see the visualization "Big Picture" map that was on the side of the article, too.

Over the last couple months, we've had a number of people[#1] come into the office to give Clearspace a test drive.  We watched while they explored the application  and asked questions. When asked what they thought of just the blogging[#2] part of the application, almost every person said that they liked the individual and team blogs but then said something like, "but blogs are just opinions," insinuating (and sometimes explicitly saying) that white papers, knowledge base articles, wiki documents and forum posts are more valuable and authoritative in a corporate environment than blogs are.

I'll be honest: I took it personally every time someone equated blogging with being nothing more than opinions and navel gazing because I think blogs are more valuable and more authoritative than all the white papers, knowledge base articles, wiki documents and forum posts in the world combined[#3]. Am I exaggerating to get your attention?  Yeah. But if you're one of those people who falls into the "blogs = just opinions" camp, consider these broad brush strokes:

• Blogs are authoritative +because +they're transparent. Blogs are generally written by a single person or a small group of people, all of whom you can read about by going to the "about me" or "about us" page on the blog. If the "about us" page doesn't cut it, you can go and read the other blog posts to get a sense of the blogger's background and interests.  Finally, you can use a tool like technorati[4|#3] to see what other people think about the blog. So when you read a blog post, you know who's standing behind it. Conversely, white papers and knowledge base article are faceless and opaque: no one person is standing behind the document saying "this is true."

• Blogs are valuable because they are written by people for people.  White papers, powerpoint presentations, knowledge base articles and wiki documents are written by companies for companies.

• Blogs are valuable because they're about subjects people care about and take seriously. It's an environment that allows for self-expressionnot like the rest of the applications you'd find in Microsoft Office orack!--things that they have to write about to complete their monthly knowledge base quota.

• Blogs are widely read because they're not white-washed, corporate-speak. People prefer the truth, it's why a lot of them have stopped watching mainstream news. There's more truth in The Daily Show.

What does all this have to do with Clearspace?  Tune in next week for some hot blogging screenshots.

By the way, my name is Aaron. I'm an engineer on the Clearspace team and I have a blog.

We've put a lot of focus on the UI and overall look & feel for Clearspace. To assist us with this, we hired Cameron Moll to conceptualize the early UI, Raja Sandhu for the logo (he's also responsible for Igniterealtime.org's logo) and Firewheel Design for new icons. Key to the collaboration was our own UI designer who ultimately took all the pieces, especially the UI, to many further levels of detail. Ultimately though, we took the iterations of these visual elements to our customers and prospects through several months of one-on-one user testing and feedback. I'll blog about the icons and UI in the next several days. But first...

The Logo

We wanted to convey many things with Clearspace's logo, particularly clarity, focus, and unity--all are functional attributes of the software. I'm sure there were many more adjectives we blabbed to Raja. He immediately fired a ton of potential sketches our way. I included some of the first round (along with a little humor from Raja) below.

We quickly gravitated to the circular treatment with the "c" and spent time refining that direction. There was also quite a discussion around negative space and just how explicit we had to be for people to see the circle and not a "stingray" shape (per example one below). The final mark (orange, below) does a lot of work and we're thrilled with the result. There's a "c" that can also be seen as fingers holding just what they're looking for. The squares represent bringing focus to different content types.

Funny, getting a logo of this quality is a bit like painting your walls a new color and then realizing that you need new furniture--so, Raja is currently thinking about some of our other products, too.

A blog about Clearspace popped up this week and reminded me how important a single, open architecture really is. Dawn Foster, who blogged about the product, participated early in our user testing. We started showing Clearspace to different types of users about 2 months ago in order to watch people use the product and learn about what was and wasn't working with the UI. That's been an amazing process and one we'll blog about some more, no doubt.

!http://jivesoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/frankenstein.jpg!Over the course of the year we've been developing Clearspace, a few competitive products have been released. Every time we've checked them out we've been shocked at how cobbled together they are. Internally, we call them "Franken-suites." All of them are merely pieced together point solutions, packaged as a single "solution" for companies who are looking for a myriad of team collaboration features.

On the surface, that may not seem so bad. I mean, most of the ingredients that people request are checked off, right? The problem is that hobbled together solutions no more remedy the problem that companies have today: lots of point solutions, each one have redundant information, wasted time, limited access and no exposure or control.

In Clearspacebecause it's one productcontent never hides, search is unified, content can be connected and built upon and there is no redundancy. Also people have one profile and identity--that means that all their contributions can build into reputation (think eBay). It's hard to imagine companies replacing all their point solutions with one of these "Frankensuites" but maybe that's why we're so excited about everyone finding out how truly powerful Clearspace really is.

This is my first week back in the office after attending my first Burning Man Festival.  My wife and I found it to be a powerful and inspiring experience. It's jaw-dropping to witness the amount of boundless engineering and creativity that people pour massive amounts of energy, time and money bringing to life for a week's time. The desert rockets from barren to the third most populous Nevada city, instantaneously. This year, 40,000 people came with no money or agenda to gather in the ancient lake bed.

It was interesting that when stripped of routine daily responsibility, how people assumed natural roles, like leaders, followers, chefs, or handimen. Even more impactful was how perfectly everything worked with 40,000 people self-managing themselves. Sorta like a real-life tag clouds. The experience did reinforce for me that communities can work amazingly well when given an open, clear space, full authority to manage themselves and when they have a powerful way to reward each other.

On another note, it was surprising to me to read the article that Dave sent to me about the Google guys using Burning Man as a recruiting event. At Burning Man everyone abandons their work ego. No one wants to talk or think about their career. Everyone is equal. For example, I learned later that one guy I drank coffee with had won three Academy Awards including work on Star Wars but when we talked he just shared which art he liked so far. I think it was the massive sculpture of the man on his hands and knees with gasoline pouring from his eyes into a pool of flame. That is, if I remember correctly.