Copyright (c) 2004, 
Dow Jones & Company Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.Togetherness, Wiki Style
LIKE SO MANY COMPANIES, Stata Labs Inc. has employees and contract workers scattered around the globe. And like so many companies, Stata Labs has struggled to find a way for its far-flung employees to work together.
The San Mateo, Calif., software maker thinks it has found the answer in a wiki.
Wikis -- "wiki-wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick" -- are Web pages to which anyone can make changes. They make it easy to add, change or delete online material without having to learn a complicated programming language -- or get anyone's permission. As a result, they allow companies and work teams to trade ideas, share intelligence and track projects.
Wikis are a modest version of one of the hottest product categories in technology today: collaboration software. Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. are beefing up their offerings to make collaboration an integral part of the desktop. Ray Ozzie, who created the early team software Lotus Notes, has launched Groove Networks Inc., based in Beverly, Mass., which enables groups from inside and outside a company to share documents and other files securely. Meanwhile, other companies, such as Vignette Corp., have enhanced their collaboration services.
These companies' products are rich in features, such as instant messaging or the ability to detect when members of the team are online. But for many users, especially smaller companies, those extras can be overkill. By contrast, with a wiki, "there's little overhead in installation, in learning" how to use it, says Gary Boone, a research manager at Accenture Technology Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. "The disadvantage of not having the sophistication of more elaborate tools is outweighed by the ease of using" the wiki.
Their simplicity has enabled wikis to spread informally within organizations, much in the way that instant messaging first took off. Individuals or departments install them, often without the help or knowledge of the corporate information-technology department, and they gradually spread as more people see their benefits.
A wiki page looks like any Web page, but with a difference: With the click of a button, a visitor can add new material to the page or change what's already there. Others can see it once they refresh the page. This isn't as disruptive as it sounds; all changes are tracked, and earlier versions can be restored if important information is deleted. There is even a wiki encyclopedia (Wikipedia.org), where anyone can add or amend entries.
Most wikis are open-source products, which can either be downloaded to a company's servers at no charge or accessed on the Web. But there are a few commercial vendors that are expressly targeting the corporate market.
An engineer at Stata Labs, which sells e-mail and antispam software, set up its first wiki last June, using an open-source product from TWiki.org, one of the many informal suppliers of wiki software. It gradually caught on among the company's other engineering teams, but problems popped up as it became more popular. For one, it was difficult to include people from outside the company, including contract programmers. What's more, using TWiki required programming skills that many in the company lacked, and the system didn't adequately back up all the valuable information that was accumulating in the wiki.
So Stata decided to move to a commercial product provided by Socialtext, a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up that sells a wiki-based collaboration service for use by businesses. It charges $995 a year for the first five users, plus $30 a month for each additional user. About 40 people are tapping into Stata's various wikis, including employees, independent contractors, product testers and others.
The company uses a wiki to manage its customer-relations program. As customers e-mail requests for new features or relate problems, the information is added to the wiki, where it can be viewed by developers in India or by Stata's chief executive in San Mateo.
Not long ago, a sales representative posted a question on the wiki about configuring the company's antispam product. Working from an Internet cafe in Florida, Andy Stack, Stata's vice president of product management, suggested a solution. The fix worked, which was duly noted on the wiki, where other engineers who had been struggling with the same question were following the exchange. If the initial back-and-forth had been conducted via e-mail, Mr. Stack says, no one else would have known of the fix.
"With e-mail, a lot of this gets trapped in one-off conversations," he says. The wiki "has the ability to capture these side conversations and make them available to all others."
Stata also can limit access to individual wiki sites, something that isn't possible with some open-source wikis. "If we bring on a really good [contract] developer, we don't necessarily want to give him access to sales details," Mr. Stack says.
Much in the same way that instant messaging grew up alongside e-mail in firms, wikis are being used to supplement existing collaboration tools. At the Palo Alto campus of Accenture Technology Labs, the research and development arm of consulting giant Accenture, researchers have access to IBM's venerable Lotus Notes and are in the process of moving some of their team collaboration to Microsoft's Sharepoint. Still, Mr. Boone, the research manager, wanted to try out a wiki for managing the flow of information around the lab.
So far, the wiki has been only lightly used. Mr. Boone's work group, which includes two programmers, uses wiki pages to organize reports on bugs and requests for new features in the software they're developing. In addition, the lab's executive assistant posts speaker schedules, lab announcements and tech-related news that can be viewed by everyone in the lab.
The biggest advantage of the wiki is that it reduces the team's reliance on overused e-mail, which in most offices serves as the last repository for all important information -- whether it's to organize contacts, store the daily to-do list or whatever. "E-mail is a tremendously overloaded tool," Mr. Boone says. The wiki "may represent a sweet spot between nothing or just e-mail and these more elaborate systems."
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Mr. Totty is a news editor for The Wall Street Journal Reports in San Francisco. He can be reached at michael.totty@wsj.com
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