Wiki Idol

Jon Silvers December 6, 2006 3:42 AM

Last week, a couple of us Atlassians participated in the Wiki Idol contest at the Gilbane Conference, a presentation event based on the U.K.'s Pop Idol and the U.S.'s American Idol. Like these shows, the contestants were subject to harsh commentary from the judges; the comments actually started out as relatively benign (they said my shirt was "so 2005"), but became harsher by the contestant (one contestant was told to get out of business altogether. Ouch).

We decided to highlight what was different about Confluence, starting with some cool plugins and moving into enterprise features like permissioning. We jumped from feature to feature, trying to highlight how Confluence is different from other wikis.

Well, we lost. The judges and audience wanted a "vanilla" wiki overview — the description one might tell their friend about what a wiki is, how it's used, and why it's good. The winner and runner up each received lovely Demotivator posters.

I take some consolation from Scott Abel's blog. He was one of the judges at Wiki Idol:

And the winner is—err, was—err, should have been

For the record, despite their technical difficulties and less-than-stellar demonstration skills, MindTouch won the Wiki Idol competition (the audience voted them number one, barely). While I believe (from what I saw demonstrated) MindTouch has a bright future in the enterprise wiki space, I think the best of the contestants was actually Atlassian Software, whose Confluence tool set offers an astounding amount of useful features with practical business value. The product (and companion website) is well-designed and the company communicates its message effectively.

Why didn’t they win Wiki Idol, you ask? They were at a disadvantage from the start as they were selected to go first (which almost always sucks). By the time the votes were tallied, I’m not sure anyone remembered how well the Atlassian team did. So, while they failed at capturing votes during the competition, they captured my attention enough that I later stopped by their booth to learn more. Look for details about their solutions on this blog in the near future.

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6 Comment(s)

How did Customervision do in the contest? Any comments about their offering?

By Bob at December 12, 2006 1:35 PM

We all looked pretty dumb in the competition. Frankly, there was a lot of background noise and many presenters, and all the demos are blurring. Our booth was sitting next to the CustomerVision booth and their demo looked good. Not sure how a company located in Iowa with a direct sales force will grow as fast as they need to in this very competitive space. Really nice folks at CustomerVision!

By Jon Silvers at December 12, 2006 2:44 PM

How would you compare your product to CustomerVision and Mindtouch? Do you consider them direct competitors?

By tom at December 14, 2006 12:30 PM

I couldn't tell you enough about either product to say how they compare exactly. They're certainly marketing themselves for as enterprise tools. I've never heard from a customer saying they compared those products with Confluence.

By Jon Silvers at December 15, 2006 7:37 AM

I'm using your wiki at work right now, and it has so many damn bugs and problems that it is driving me crazy. Unfortunately I'm not an admin so I can't delete this junk and I can't believe we were stupid enough to pay for it. There are times when I simply cut an paste a line of wiki code (such as for creating a calendar) and it works 1 of 5 reloads of the page...or I change the id to something other than 'test' and it fails to even load...no errors, nothing. Or I switch the view to the week mode and I get errors like this: "$resources.getString("duration.allDay")"...?!?!?! What the hell, I get code inside my wiki output?!? Geezus Krist, check your product before you release this crap. This is just one example of the problems that this "Enterprise" wiki is having....don't even get me started on the style sheets and how I a damn Header (h1) tag has a a freaking huge margin that I can't change unless I change code...geez.

By Guest at July 6, 2007 2:20 AM

Wow. Sorry to hear about all the frustration you're experiencing. I'd be happy to respond via email or phone if you care to give us (or just me jon@atlassian.com) your contact info. You can also email sales@atlassian.com or fill out a support ticket at support.atlassian.com, or if it's convenient, call our support group at +1 415 701 1110. We answer our phones and really do want to help out.

I had never used a wiki before starting my job here at Atlassian, and now I can't imagine doing work or collaborating in any other way. Confluence is not without its frustrations, it's not perfect, there are always bugs and new features that need work. Still, we stand behind our products and engineering as being the best in the business.

Please don't stay anonymous! Get in touch, we'll give it our best shot to turn things around.

Jon

By Jon Silvers at July 6, 2007 2:49 AM