ProjectSpaces vs Wikis

There's a lot of buzz these days about wikis as online collaboration tools. Wikis are collaboratively editable webpages and are great tools for some situations. They are very flexible and allow groups of people to contribute to a shared body of knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia). They work very well for developers and others who need to develop software documentation, frequently asked questions, policies, human resources information, etc. In some cases they work very well for groups that need to collaborate on projects and activities. However, for they aren't as good a choice for groups that need to share documents, manage tasks, maintain a shared calendar, and have discussions.

Wikis can be too unstructured. For some groups wikis don't work well for team or project collaboration because they don't provide enough structure. For groups that primarily need to share and collaborate on documents, manage tasks, and have discussions, it can be cumbersome to post these to wiki pages and organize them so others can find and update them later. ProjectSpaces has more structure out-of-the-box so that groups can just start using it - documents, tasks, discussions, and news can be posted with one or two clicks and don't need to be organized or managed carefully to keep them from getting lost.

Wikis can take more time to set up and administer.For administrators, ProjectSpaces is often easier to set up because it already has an intuitive navigation structure in place. Wikis sometimes require a lot of effort to set up a skeleton structure of pages that can organize the groups content effectively. In addition, less sophisticated user groups often require more training on how to interact effectively with the wiki.

A great option for some groups = "shared documents". ProjectSpaces does allow collaborative editing of "shared documents" which are online documents that can be edited by a big group of people. These are great for meeting agendas, white papers, reports, or other documents that require input from a number of users. Share documents can then be exported into word if needed.