To further Read/WriteWeb’s
continuing look at the Web Office space, I spoke again recently with Joe Kraus – CEO of
JotSpot. What started out as a wiki company, is slowly
but surely morphing into a Web Office suite contender. Although JotSpot does not actually
position itself in that way – they’re positioned as a kind of wiki/office hybrid, which
we discuss in detail in this post. Also JotSpot has just released 3 new features, which
are outlined below.
Back in July, JotSpot released
its 2.0 version. It was described by Joe Kraus at that point as “wikis meets
Microsoft Office”. The upgrade enabled JotSpot users to collaborate on different types of
“office-like” products. Its spreadsheet product, Tracker, was integrated into their core
wiki product – along with calendars, File Cabinets, Photo Pages.
New Features
In the latest release of JotSpot, more apps have been added to their application
gallery: group directory, forum and To Do Lists. Nothing revolutionary there, but
it beefs up their Office Suite credentials a bit more. This screenshot from their Applications Gallery page shows the latest list of
office (aka productivity) apps:
Page Type Model
These are all “Page Types”, which basically means different types of productivity
applications presented as Wiki pages. The theory behind this, Joe told me, is that all
the Page Types “have this wiki-esque properties – they’re group editable, they’re
immediately collaborative, they have the same access control model on top of them.”
Hybrid Wiki/Office
Joe said to me that although JotSpot still positions itself as a wiki nowadays – they
don’t necessarily see themselves in that space in 5-10 years. But he said the metaphor of
wikis still has appeal to people, as a representation of the Web’s shift from a monolog
to a dialog – aka the read/write web! JotSpot then is about “bringing the familiarity
that people have with office [software] and bringing the Wiki metaphor to that.” In
essence, bringing the ‘dialog’ and collaboration features of wikis into the office
environment.
The reason JotSpot is positioning itself as something different than a straight Web
Office Suite (with word processing, spreadsheets, etc) is that Joe believes Microsoft
itself will eventually position itself in that market. They don’t want to compete with
them with that positioning – hence the wiki/office hybrid vision which JotSpot has, which
approaches the space from a different angle. JotSpot’s strategy is to “embrace and extend
the space” (more on that in an
earlier interview I did with Joe).
I completely agree with Joe that Web Office startups need to do things differently and
more Web native than Microsoft (and Google). Indeed that’s the topic I spoke about in my
recent
Office 2.0 Podcast Jam podcast.
Screenshots of new JotSpot features
To conclude, here are screenshots of the latest new JotSpot Page Types:
Group Directory
Forum
To Do List
