Now that I’ve started to talk with analysts and other early adopters about PBworks’ upcoming Real-time Collaboration update (more on that later), one of the very first questions I always get is, “Is that like Google Wave?”

Many people, even industry experts, are under the impression that Google Wave is the first product to offer real-time collaborative editing.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, real-time editing has been around for decades.  So in the interests of the common good, I’m offering this brief history of real-time editing.

While true industry pros will tell you that real-time editing has existed since the PDP-10 era, the first citation that appears on Wikipedia is Instant Update for the Mac, circa 1991.  More recently, the primary real-time editor that people cite is SubEthaEdit, though this product remains relatively unknown outside of developer circles.

In the wiki/collaboration world, real-time editing has been around since JotSpotLive…which, ironically enough, was acquired by Google (and then dumped in the dustbin).

More recently, Etherpad (disclosure, I am a personal investor in its parent company, AppJet) launched its web-based real-time collaboration tool in November of 2008, and has built up a tidy little following.

So by the time that Google Wave emerged in May 2009, real-time collaboration had been around for nearly 20 years, and had even existed as part of the Google family (prior to JotSpot’s burial at sea).

That’s not to say that real-time collaboration, being old rather than new, isn’t groundbreaking.  In fact, we here at PBworks believe it has a ton of potential…the key is figuring out how to apply it to the all-important task of getting work done.

We think we’ve done so, and will be unveiling the PBworks take on real-time collaboration at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (which you can attend for free!).

Those of you who are PBworks customers and users, stay tuned next week for a special sneak preview….

One of the recent requests we received from a Project Edition customer asked, “Can I set up my network so that anyone from my company can join the network, without my having to invite them?”

This made a ton of sense, especially as Project Edition gets rolled out to ever larger numbers of corporate customers.  That’s why we’re introducing our simple, two-step Network User Signup system.

Step 1: Specify trusted email domains.

You can now set up your PBworks network so that anyone from a trusted email domain (such as mycompany.com) can join the network.  Just click on “Network Access” within the “Settings” tab:

You can even whitelist and blacklist specific IP addresses for added security.

2. If you have an email account on a trusted domain, you can now join the network.

First, click the “Join this network” link:

Next, enter your email address.  We’ll send you an email with instructions on how to set up your network account:

You can specify as many email domains and/or IP addresses as you need to.

If you’ve ever wondered how the functionality of Facebook and Twitter might be able to help you get your work done, the PBworks Social Collaboration Update gives you the chance to find out for yourself.

Starting today, PBworks Project Edition (and PBworks Legal Edition) now includes social networking-style user profiles, Twitter-style microblogging, and the ability to create wiki pages (with file attachments) just by emailing a single email address.

We encourage you to try out these new features (which are included in every 30-day free trial of Project Edition) and let us know what you think in the comments for this post.  We’d love to hear your take!

If you want to learn more first, check out the Social Collaboration Update page, and the frequently-asked-questions below.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from all the other social software products out there?

• PBworks isn’t a social software product.  Our focus is on helping people get work done.  We look at individual business problems, and then try to find technology that solves that problem.  We’ve tweaked each of the features to reflect this emphasis:
  • Our user profiles allow the corporate administrator to specify the fields and choices, so that you can create a searchable database of locations, skills, certifications, or anything else the company deems relevant (PBworks’ own employee profiles include Myers-Briggs personality type)
  • Our user profiles also include activity history (edits, uploads, comments, task updates, etc.) and tasks so that you can tell what a person has been doing, and what they’re planning to do.  This combination of static and dynamic information presents a clearer picture of each user for the purposes of getting work done
  • Our microblogging solution is integrated into our overall activity streams.  This means that you have real work context (what they’ve been doing) for each person’s posts.

What good are social networking-style profiles in the enterprise?

• We found that our customers with geographically dispersed workforces needed a better way to identify the relevant people within the organization to turn to for everything from social media experience to the most granular of technical certifications.

What good is microblogging in the enterprise?

• Our users told us that microblogging was really good for unstructured, real-time collaboration like brainstorming.  The ideas the generated that way could then be put into more structured collaboration tools like workspace pages or project workspaces and tasks.

How much will this update cost?

• Nothing!  It’s a free update to our Project and Legal Editions.

Do your user profiles integrate with Active Directory?

• No, but that’s a great suggestion.  You can use AD and other LDAP solutions to log into PBworks, but we don’t currently carry over user profile data.  Definitely on our roadmap.

Where can I see a demo?

• If you want, you can sign up for a free trial here, and play with it yourself.
• You can also access a pre-built demo by following the instructions on this page.

For most of us, work is a series of projects.

We’re always drawing up plans (some more formal than others) and trying to carry them out, usually as part of a team.

That’s why it’s not surprising that so many people use PBworks for project management.  After all, if PBworks is a great solution for improving team productivity and work performance, shouldn’t it be great for project management?  And when we asked you what you were using PBworks for, “managing projects” was the #1 answer.

But in reality, while PBworks was helping a lot of people manage their projects, it was far from ideal.

Even within the company, where we use PBworks for pretty much everything (including project management), we felt the limitations of the product.  When I create a task, I want to be able to assign it to someone with a due date.  I don’t want to be forced to try to remember where I wrote down the task.  I want notifications to go out when the status of the task changes.  I don’t want to forget when things are due.  Yet manually managing projects with the old PBworks product had all of these drawbacks.

It’s a testament to the power of the product that despite these issues, so many were getting so much productivity out of it!

So over the past few months, we went back to the drawing board and started talking to our users.  We conducted dozens of interviews with consultants, PR firms, designers, marketers, and other project leads, including in-depth follow-ups.

As a result, we were able to design PBworks Project Edition, which represents a major leap in project functionality.  In our opinion, it’s the best tool anywhere for managing the vast majority of projects.

What makes Project Edition special?  Certainly we’re very proud of how we’ve created task and milestone functionality that is simple, elegant, and flexible.  But the real key is in combining project management with collaboration in a neatly integrated package.

Historically, project management separated the “management” from the real work.  Picture a Project Manager walking around with a clipboard, collecting status reports, and fiddling with Ganntt charts.  Great for putting a man on the moon, but not appropriate for all the informal, fast-moving projects that make up the bulk of our working days.

The first Web 2.0 project management tools broke the monopoly of the project manager, and put the ability to view and manage the project in the hands of the entire team, but they still didn’t help you do the real work.  You would log in, pick up your next task, then switch to another application or window to do the actual work.

Project Edition combines “management” with a collaborative platform that lets your team do their work faster and better.  Sometimes as much as 10 times better.

That’s the breakthrough we’re calling “organic project management,” since the management is a natural and organic result of doing the real work.

Our goal isn’t to displace the project management tools that people use for the 0.1% of projects that are formally managed (though you can certainly do that with Project Edition).  It’s to radically improve performance for the 99.9% of projects where the most sophisticated management tool is the Post-It pad.

You can try out Project Edition for free for 30 days and see what consulting firms and agencies like Deloitte and Ogilvy are raving about.  We’re confident that you’ll like it, even if you’ve never used any other project management tools in your work.  And if you have used other tools, we’re even more confident that you’ll find our product easier, faster, more flexible, and most importantly, more productive than anything you’ve used before.

Don’t just believe us…here’s what other folks are saying:

“Simple project management functionality, like workflow management, task assignment and milestones, is built right into the tool, so there’s no need to use a separate app like Basecamp to handle simple project management. This makes PBworks an attractive option for teams looking for a tool for collaborative project tasks, like document authoring, requirements gathering or design review. Task management is kept together with the actual task itself, which makes a lot of sense.”
–WebWorkerDaily

“A busy manager could check the new project coordination workspace to get a quick status update, use the discussion feature associated with each task to communicate with a team member, or add a new task and assign it to someone – all without ever sending an email. This feature alone makes the new PBworks Project Edition very attractive.”
–Future Changes

Get the scoop on Project Edition by visiting our Project Edition minisite.

Introducing a whole new way to create pages on your PBworks. Our newest feature – Document Import – allows you to convert your Microsoft Office files into pages on your PBworks space.

The recent document management release allowed you to upload and share your documents and files – but it was still tricky to copy information from word and paste it onto your workspace.

“I have about 50 multi-page MS Word files that I need to bring in to PBworks, retaining links and basic formatting… I’ve tried copy/paste, but none of the formatting is retained and it takes way too long to create bulleted lists, redo hyperlinks, add bold text, etc. I’ve tried exporting the Word file to HTML, but I get all the Word garbage. “

The new Document Import feature makes it unbelievably easy to import a document or spreadsheet to your PBworks, so that the document’s content is copied onto a page in your workspace.  Here’s how:

Create a new page: Title your page and choose document import

Your new page will display all content – including images and color formatting – from your original word document.

That’s it! This is now a live page in your workspace, you can edit and change the formatting of your page.

Here’s a quick Q&A about the new document import feature:

Q: What files can I convert to pages on my workspace?
A: You can convert MS Word (.doc, .docx), WordPerfect (.wpd), Open Document Format (.odt), Plain text (.txt), MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx), Open Document Format (.ods), Comma-separated Values (.csv)

Q: Can I export my page as a word document?
The document import allows you to create workspace pages from your Microsoft office files, but you can not export them to Microsoft files just yet.

Q: How do I turn on this feature?
As always, there is nothing to download or turn on.  This feature is already available on all premium business workspaces – including the new legal edition PBworks. Try it today by creating a new page on your PBworks space.

We’ve recently released the third generation of our single sign-on capability, which represents a significant increase in functionality.

Previous generations of PBwiki’s single sign-on let you authenticate people from a particular domain; in other words, if I ran an authentication server for ChrisYeh.com, I could allow other people with ChrisYeh.com identities to log into my individual PBwiki without creating their own PBwiki accounts.

However, we discovered that many of you wanted to authenticate people from more than one domain, and for more than one wiki.  This is a complicated problem, so we sent our resident genius and CTO, Nathan, off to build a solution.  He returned with Single Sign-On 3.0.

Now you can authenticate people from any domain to access any wiki that you control.

Since I am but a marketing guy, for the full details, I’ll turn you over to Nathan and Steven, one of our Support Gurus:

“Single Sign-On (AKA SSO AKA delegated authentication) allows you to build an authentication server that can use your existing user database/directory to help identify and verify users so they may have access to your company’s PBwikis. By doing this you eliminate the need for your users to register an account with PBwiki which in turn eliminates the need for them to remember another username/password.

In four steps the user can use their existing identity to log into into https://my.pbwiki.com or https://wikiname.pbwiki.com. Depending on the authentication server, you may also be able to set delays (wait period before logging in), access levels (reader, writer, editor, admin), and wiki access (wiki1, wiki2, wiki3 or all the wikis).

Here’s how it works:

1) Your user visits the wiki, and if not already logged in they’re redirected to your authentication server along with several URL parameters required to complete a login.

2) Your authentication server identifies the user and determines the wikis and access levels to grant.

3) Your authentication server redirects the user back PBwiki along with securely signed URL parameters which indicate to our servers who the user is and what permissions they should have on your wikis.

4) PBwiki verifies the URL parameters and signature, then creates a new user account if necessary and then grants the indicated permissions and issues an appropriate set of session cookies for the particular user.

For more details on SSO 3.0, you can refer to our documentation on delegated authentication.

Our new feature, Starred Pages, makes it super simple to bookmark the pages that matter most to you and quickly navigate to them.

If you have a large wiki with hundreds of pages, you probably work on only few of these pages but you receive notifications about all the changes on every page.

Now you can bookmark the pages that matter most to you and create a personal folder of just starred pages.

Personalized Notifications (Premium Feature)
Starred Pages goes beyond simply providing a convenient bookmark. Now premium users can chose to receive selective notifications about just those starred pages. Before, you could only turn workspace notifications on or off. Now you can choose between four different levels:

1. No notifications for this workspace
2. Only notify me about changes to Starred Pages
3. Only notify me about changes to Starred Pages and newly added items (new pages and files)
4. Notify me about all changes to this workspace

Click the star, to bookmark a page

View your starred pages on The Navigator

Or view all starred pages on your personal dashboard

Set notification preferences (Premium Feature)

We’re really excited about this new feature and so are the people already using it!

“Personalized notifications!!! You guys listened to us! Woohoo! thank you, thank you, thank you. Our IT documentation will benefit from this greatly”. -Elias P.

For more details about how to use Starred Pages and Granular Notifications, check out our user manual.

Today collaborating on your wiki became that much easier!

We’re excited to introduce the new “Send a link” feature. This feature lets you tell other members of your team that you’ve updated the workspace, and ask them to review, comment, or edit the page.

Before when you wanted to share work with your team, you had to wait for them to receive wiki notifications. If you wanted immediate feedback on your work, you had to copy the URL and paste it into an email. (What a waste of time!)

Now use the “Send a link” feature to immediately share your work and ask for feedback. Here’s how:

When you’re done updating the page, click ’send a link’

Add a short explanation and send to any member of the wiki.

The “Send a link” feature makes it easy to collaborate on specific pages and share page drafts between your team.

How will you use this feature? Tell us in the comments!

When we created PBwiki 2.0 one of the most important new features was the addition of folders. Folders allowed you to create specific sections on your wiki to organize pages and navigate to other pages in that folder.

We heard from many of you that folders were great, but you wanted an easier way to access content from other folders or even pages that weren’t in folders.

We heard you! Today we’re excited to introduce The Navigator, a new way view the pages and files of any folder and quickly jump to a specific page. The Navigator also gives you a quick way to locate your Starred Pages.

View all of your folders and starred pages

Click on the folder to view all pages and files

The Navigator will make it much easier to find all the pages and files on your wiki. Here’s what our Alpha Team users have to say:

“The Navigator is a great feature! I will definitely use it in my wikis, because it adds order, speed and convenience to seeing where things are.” – Larry B

For more details on how to use The Navigator, check out our user manual.

As a wiki grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to find and track the pages and files that matter most to you. For the last several months, we’ve been researching and designing a new way to organize and share information on your wiki.

Starred pages- Bookmark all important wiki pages and create a personal list of information that is important to you.

Selective Notifications- Tailor notifications to monitor only your starred pages. Stay up to date, automatically and avoid notification overload.

Navigator- Quickly navigate to any folder, and browse all pages on your wiki. The Navigator also gives you a quick way to view your Starred Pages.

Send a link- Tell other members of your team that you’ve updated the workspace, or to call them to review, comment, or edit the page.

We’ve already heard some awesome feedback about these features:

“Notification is the killer feature in this update. The idea that I can create/modify a page, then proactively notify all team members (or specific ones) that they have an action to perform is a great time-saver. We use PBwiki to manage workflow, and this make it a much more valuable tool.”

What do you think about this release? We’d love to hear from you!