Patrick and I watched a web seminar today on Wikispaces Private Label. This is a pay service from Wikispaces targeted at business and education clients. Essentially we would get a web-based tool to manage a lot of users and a lot of wiki “spaces”, which are collaborative web documents shared by an enumerated list of users.
The product looked fine, but I feel like the demand for wiki has dried up on the IWU campus. Most people are just using Google Docs to collaborate. Am I wrong here? Do we still need a wiki solution that is more manageable than free ad-supported wiki accounts online?
I don’t think you’re wrong at all. From what I can tell, people find the Google Docs suite easy to use and easy to collaborate with. And, given that the set of things you can do with a wiki-based page is a subset of the things you can do with Google Docs, it makes much more sense from a learning and integration standpoint to support Google Docs instead of Google Docs and wikis.
There are currently 171 IWU community members who have signed up for Google accounts using their IWU email addresses, even though there hasn’t been a forced switch. This says to me that people really like those Google services available through Google Apps (and we don’t even have Gmail access).