On his blog, David Strom highlighted a conversation he had with Ray Velez about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. In his post, he discussed some of the lessons learnt which included paying attention to authentication, security and search.
Separately, Jeffery Walker, President of Atlassian Software discussed thie wiki on his blog. He argued that the custom work required to modify mediawiki demonstrated that the solution is not enterprise software. Jeffery also argued that by virtue of requiring an intern and two part time developers, the wiki (to quote him) "is not fulfilling the promise of Enterprise 2.0 software which should be: lightweight software suitable for enterprises for dramatically less money."
What do you think? I disagree. Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.
Commercial enterprise 2.0 software like Socialtext, Brainkeeper and Atlassian Confluence are great options for some business scenarios and we often recommend them to our own clients. But in other cases, simply modifying open source sofware can get an organization what it needs. Our wiki did not cost us $100,000 to build. Furthermore, by modifying mediawiki we were able to get exactly what we needed. Most importantly, by virtue of how it is being used, we know that it is social software in an organization - and that's the most important part of an enterprise 2.0 solution.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AvenueARazorfish-Th...