In an article yesterday, InformationWeek named PBWiki their favorite on-demand wiki.  I tried out PBWiki myself, and here’s my take on it:

I agree that it takes very little time to get started with a new Wiki.  The site is very fast, and generally very easy to use.  It only took me about 30 seconds to get a Wiki up and running.  Editing pages is smooth and pretty reliable.  Their rich text editor is pretty solid and speedy.  As with most Wikis, it’s very easy to keep tabs on who’s been updating pages through a Recent Updates page.

Security is pretty straightforward.  It’s easy to add a bulk list of users just by specifying their email addresses, and it’s easy to lock down pages to various levels of editing and viewing by guests and authenticated users.  Premium accounts can also whitelist and blacklist IP addresses.  It would be nice if PBWiki supported LDAP connectivity.  It doesn’t appear to be available as of yet, at least none that I could find in the documentation. Updated: Thanks to Chris Yeh from PBWiki who pointed me to the API documentation for LDAP integration with PBWiki. http://pbwiki.com/api_v2/#Delegated_Auth

PBWiki is really designed to be a true SaaS offering.  It supports multi-tenancy very well.  Premium accounts can even add have their own custom domain name to support wiki.[your domain].com.

A few things that could be better: there’s no Wiki syntax.  For anyone accustomed to using Wiki syntax with other Wikis like Atlassian Confluence or MediaWiki, Wiki syntax is shorthand for formatting (like *bold* or /italics/) that gets converted to HTML when the page is rendered in the Wiki.  The result of that is that when you have edits which only pertain to formatting, PBWiki can’t tell you what the difference was.  The folder structure isn’t very complex — you can only have one level of depth to a folder, and it’s not possible to build navigation around parent/child topics as with other Wiki solutions.  It’s a bit amusing to see the FamFamFam Silk icon set used so heavily, although many Wikis have adopted it as their icon set.

Overall, though, PBWiki is certainly a fantastic out-of-the-box on-demand SaaS-style Wiki.  I definitely found it more useful than Google Sites, a similar offering from Google.

PBWiki is now supporting over 500,000 wiki pages.

As an open question to my friends over at Atlassian: when are you going to make your on-demand version of Confluence as easy to deploy as PBWiki?  I suppose it’s a question of: does it make sense for Atlassian to compete in the SaaS Wiki market given that the majority of usage for Atlassian is software development Wikis.  That’s perhaps one SaaS sore-spot.  I could imagine that some software companies might feel a little nervous about the idea of putting their software development notes up on the web where anyone might attempt to spy on them. 

But I have to imagine there are also a lot of other research organizations that would like to use Atlassian in a SaaS mode to cut down on the cost of hosting it themselves, and obtain more flexible pricing.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Enterprise Web, Knowledge Management, SaaS, Social Computing, Wikis