i've written about wikis before and this is a continuation on the theme.
wiki's are just simply appealing because of how they allow one to put content on the web instantly.
over the years i'd primarily used wikis as an online notebook, accessible from anywhere as long as i had an internet connection.
but i remember years ago when groove came out that i read something about the research that groove was based on. (my brain may be misremembering this and i can't find the link anymore that supports this memory fragment.) it figured that not all users like to work online (what?). so groove was built - among other reasons - as a peer-to-peer content sharing and collaboration platform that allowed users to work offline on content before uploading it and to download content to their local systems.
now, groove is one way of taking sharepoint content offline; see for example an assessment here. colligo is another.
why am i suddenly on the topic of sharepoint? - well, i've used sharepoint on SAP HCM implementation projects and use it internally in my own organization - EPIUSE - and offlining is something that's pretty important if you're going to be on the road or somewhere without a connection - like BART.
we use the WSS 3.0 wiki capabilities and, just like i used to do with some of my wiki-'notebooks' way back when, i'd like to take our sharepoint wiki content offline as well. i was able to replicate my old wiki's - like fpwiki - on my local system simply by downloading the access database it ran on to my local IIS server. can't do that of course with sharepoint. fact is that groove and colligo is only capable of taking offline document libraries and such. which may make perfect sense to some, given that wiki's are meant to be online.
right? not right in my opinion.
the thing is that i would very much like to read offline - even if not quite be able to edit - the wiki content on our sharepoint server.
this is one of the reasons i found tiddlywiki so appealing - it's offline wiki'ing without a problem. (tiddlywiki has been picked up recently by BT; commentary by Jeff Nolan and Dennis Howlett.)
what i find just immensely frustrating is how much software microsoft is sitting on that could imho be put to better use. here we have a sharepoint wiki. i can't view the content offline. (and offline is important - let's not forget e.g. about google gears.) i can't easily link from one web page or wiki page to another or to a file - i have to look up and paste URLs around (there are other wiki's that are better at this, but in many respects they don't provide what sharepoint does as a whole). i can't do flashy things (ha! what am i talking about) on a wiki page like outlay-like intersperse document libraries, pictures, text, blog excerpts on a single page or a wiki-page, almost ala zoho notebook. i can't easily print a wiki page. i can't download it to word or powerpoint. i can't go from word to wiki and back again. i can't go from excel to wiki table and back again.
microsoft has so much at it's disposal - can't it make a collaboration platform that really works. i'm sure they've thought of this. we know they must be aware of what's being built by the makers of tiddlywiki, zoho and pbwiki.
ok, so this is an ironic post. let's just leave it there.
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