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.