Wikipedia aside, wikis just don’t get any respect. PBwiki, a startup that specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis, finally realized that and has officially changed its name to PBworks. Founder and Chief Product Officer David Weekly says the name change reflects the company’s expansion into offerings and functionality that extend beyond just a wiki. That is his story and he is sticking to it.

PBworks, which had an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. The company is also introducing a new project management application in the next few months. The company also rolled out a “Legal Edition” which merges a wiki with case management features, offers a legal knowledge base, and an electronic deal room to manage files that require review, input, and approval by legal professionals.

Currently, PBworks manages 50,000 wiki groups, with 10 million pages and 3 million users per month, according to the company. ComScore shows healthy growth and 2.1 million unique visitors worldwide (see chart below).

PBworks has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams at over a third of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University. Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Atlassian Confluence, and Socialtext.

My TechCrunch internship has ended, and for my final TechCrunchIT post, I wanted to connect the dots I see within the enterprise space. Thanks for the wonderful time.

When Writely and Zoho Writer launched three years ago, some quickly predicted the end for Microsoft Office. It seemed so obvious: free beats paid, ubiquitous access beats the device-centric, thick-client model.

But IT departments worry about security, Excel junkies remain skeptical of reduced functionality, and airline travelers are only now getting in-flight broadband. Given enough time, these problems will be solved.In the meantime, Microsoft isn’t a dunce. Once the lumbering Redmond giant shifts to a SaaS model and monetizes at the edges, these online clones of Microsoft Office will become commodities. Do you
prefer vanilla or chocolate frosting… Google or Microsoft?

Office documents are dead.

Not because Zoho Office and Google Docs are free. But because when office suites went online, they grabbed hold of the content creation method and promptly tipped it on its side. Writing a document shifted from multiple, one-shot drafts to a single draft with multiple revisions. Online office suites killed the static document model–and file formats. (Perhaps even toolbelt office suites.)

Historically, technology goes mainstream by solving a specific problem. Word processors replaced typewriters because they could fix typos. Dropbox removed worries about my hard drive failing. Online FAQ’s replace help files. Google Docs frees me to work from any browser.

Once mainstream, new technology shifts from facilitating work-flow to rewiring the process. I used Google Docs for several months before realizing the power to co-write. Instead of copy/paste, three of us worked on a single document from separate computers. (Lotus Notes pioneered this functionality twenty years ago, but it required Notes on each machine.)

Suddenly corporate wikis are maintained by users, links to Dropbox replace e-mail attachments, and the idea of a static document is dead.Slideshare is a classic example. What began as an online repository for slidedecks–a souped-up FTP for PowerPoint–is now a destination site. For now, the metadata–tags, favorites, comments, views, downloads, etc–sits on top of a static slideshow. But how long until Slideshare adds editing capability? Then I leave a comment by altering the wording, removing a non-Presentation Zen image there, adding an entire slide here.

When Slideshare spawned its own storytelling meme, “Meet Henry,” users made modified clones of the original slideshow to suit their needs. What if they could alter the original? The line between data and metadata could get very blurry. (The ensuing copyright nightmares are beyond the scope of this post.)

No matter which side of the firewall, it’s a living document–Rashmi from Slideshare told me: “Lots of companies use SlideShare privacy options for sharing and to embed into their intranets… we cannot dig
into it (for privacy reasons)–but one of our large referrers is Microsoft.”

Similarly, wiki’s are morphing from solving today’s problems into tomorrow’s new way to create, aggregate, and filter content. According to Chris Yeh, PBwiki has a long-term vision, “to be the really simple glue across an enterprise. By adding context on top of specific buckets–Salesforce, e-mail, documents, etc–wiki’s become a powerful form of enterprise search.”

Slideshare, wiki’s, SaaS office suites–what happens when they’re integrated? (Already you can view Google Docs from PBwiki and Slideshare from SocialText.)

After the inevitable confusion, the oil and water of new technology and old workflow will coalesce into a new perspective on information. Realtime collaboration will kill the static document model. The line between documents will feel artificial–much like a database view merely constrains the output. When the community can create metadata, “Word documents” become “a print-view” of the wiki
page”–perhaps excluding comments, or maybe limiting them to only comments from the marketing team within the past week. (Prezi is already rewriting the rules on UI and interaction.)

For Microsoft, using “.doc”, “.xls”, and “.ppt” in the same sentence as “floppy” and “AOL” is a frightening prospect. And yet maybe it shouldn’t be. If you can’t dominate a platform, the next best thing is making sure your competitors can’t win either. When files become generic, platform ownership is impossible–examples include .html, .txt, and .jpg.

RIP .doc, .xls, and .ppt. You’ll be missed.

Seattle based wiki-startup Wetpaint has been talking to a number of big content sites about a new product they’ll be releasing soon, we’ve heard. The screen shot above is a mock-up that Wetpaint is using to pitch potential partners.

The product is an embeddable wysiwyg wiki. That alone is interesting, just because there aren’t any easy ways to embed a wiki into third party sites today. Google Sites doesn’t yet allow embeds, for example. PBWiki, a popular wiki startup, does allow embeds via their API, but it isn’t as simple to use as most widgets.

But what we’re hearing is that this isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, although we haven’t heard of any products doing this before.

Why is that interesting? It’s interesting because it pulls the Wiki content directly into a site’s HTML and allows it to be indexed by search engines. That means partner sites will get the SEO benefits of the wiki, a major plus for these partners.

That’s all we know for now. The product is being called Balco, although that may be an internal project name, not the name of the to-be-launched product. If Balco is as useful as we’re hearing, it’s definitely something we’ll use here at TechCrunch.

Update: PBWiki’s David Weekly adds something related to this in his API documentation (scroll to bottom). When/if Wetpaint launches Balco, we’ll do a side by side comparison.

Personally, I find the UI to still be something that an engineer would love more than a graphic designer. But it is an improvement. Adding skins is a move in the right direction. What’s your favorite wiki?

Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views – they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki.

This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well – wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views.

Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply.

The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors):

PBWiki is on a bit of a roll. After confirming a $2 million round of financing last week, they’ve just launched a partnership with 30Boxes that allows users to insert a calendar into a wiki. Actually getting the calendar into the wiki requires way too many steps, and I agree with 30Boxes founder Narendra Rocherolle that this should be made into a template option, as Jotspot did in 2006, shortly before their acquisition by Google.

Wikis are basically commodities at this point. There are dozens of hosted and unhosted versions to choose from, and revenue models are pretty thin. PBWiki has a loyal following of users, though, and has spent very little money getting to where they are today. We’ll see how they do over the next year.

PBwiki advertises itself as the easiest way to quickly create a hosted wiki and the company’s product is particularly well executed.  It recently added a What You See is What You Get editor, which if satisfactory to new users, could help PBwiki overcome one of the primary barriers to wiki adoption.  The recent upgrade also added the ability to include YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, stock charts and chat functionality to your wikis.  Chat will likely be useful but I question how many of their users will be excited about the rest of the new features.  PBWiki’s basic features are what make it shine.

Weekly told me that there are more than 200,000 PBwikis and a substantial portion of them have been active in the past 60 days.  (My ten sleeping PBwikis notwithstanding, apparently.)  Weekly says the ads on free accounts make less than 5% of the company’s revenue; premium accounts are available for between $10 and $35 per month.  He says the 8 person company brings in enough money to be “profitable some months.”

Weekly says that he expects to make an announcement about interoperability with other wiki providers in the next few weeks.  I like PBwiki but will be curious to see what they have up their sleeve that would give confidence to institutional investors.  Mohr Davidow Ventures doesn’t typically invest in consumer facing, web 2.0 type companies.

The enterprise wiki landscape is widely seen as a mess, bereft of reliable, usable and lightweight solutions – perhaps we’ll see someone scoop up this solid service soon. Please hold the jokes about a possible Yahoo! acquisition.

Competitors include Wikispaces, Wikia and others.