Release Overview

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from Google Wave?

  • Google Wave and PBworks Real-time Collaboration both reflect two common (and we believe correct) beliefs: One, that real-time is important, and two, that interactivity matters.  Where we differ is how we go about living up to those beliefs.
  • Google Wave is an ambitious attempt to re-think the concept of individual communication.  Wave provides a real-time, interactive inbox that's designed to do away with traditional email and permit a host of third-party add-ons.  It's explicitly a blue-sky experiment.
  • PBworks Real-time Collaboration recognizes the importance of real-time collaboration for teams (right now, real-time collaboration takes place in web conferences, conference calls, or face-to-face meetings) and asks, "Why should you need a separate platform for real-time collaboration?"  It's built around corporate networks and project workspaces, and coordinating and managing the activity of a team trying to get work done.  Instead of a blue-sky experiment, it takes existing ways of getting things done and makes them much better.

 

Here is a chart that illustrates some of the differences:

 
Google Wave PBworks
  • Beta technology
  • Commercial product
  • Ad hoc communications
  • Workgroup collaboration
  • Individual consumer focus
  • Enterprise product with admin and security tools
  • Loose collection of plugins
  • Tightly integrated, seamless user experience

These two quotes tell an important story:

  • "In informal conversations with clients, and the many contacts I have both within the usability community and the software business world as a whole, I’ve heard nearly unanimously that Wave has the "most complicated and confusing interface" of any "2.0" solution in recent history."
  • "With PBworks' latest release, the convergence of collaboration of many types becomes even tighter and 'in the flow' than ever before."
    • Dan Keldsen, Information Architected

 

What benefits do people get from real-time collaboration?

  • Real-time collaboration has always been important when speed and interactivity are key.  Real-time collaboration (e.g. meetings) are critical to rapid iteration, reaching decisions, and resolving issues.  But historically, to meet virtually via something like Cisco WebEx required a lot of overhead.  A user needs to set up a meeting (even a so-called "instant" meeting), send out links and dial-in information to all interested parties, usually via email, and then wait for all parties to arrive.  As a result, we tend to save these meetings for substantial agenda of at least 30 minutes, and more often an hour or more.
  • But when people are in the same room, collaboration doesn't take place in formal hour-long meetings--it takes place in quick, ad hoc conversations that quickly resolve issues and keep the team moving forward.  That's what we're trying to enable with PBworks Real-time Collaboration.
  • If a user is editing a page and realizes that he or she needs the input of other team members, he or she can summon them to the appropriate page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call, all in fraction of the time it would take to set up a web conference, set up a conference call line, and communicate the details to the intended participants.
  • Not only does this allow PBworks to replace traditional conferencing services for many meetings, it enables a kind of nimble "on-demand" collaboration that these other services simply never supported.

 

How much will this update cost?

  • Nothing!  It's a free update to our Project and Legal Editions.

 

Where can I see a demo? 

 

Logo

 

Product Screenshots

 

IM Collaboration:

Integrated IM to contact co-workers and call them to your workspace page.

 

Live Notifications:

Stay on top of activity as it happens, filtered by "starred pages" and people you're "following".

 

Live Editing:

Broadcast live, streaming edits to all the users viewing a workspace page. Quicker than web conferencing, really powerful with group chat, voice.

 

Voice Collaboration:

Initiate instant conference calls with co-workers, add new callers at any time, plus automated recording and storage.

 

Analyst Contacts

  • Gil Yehuda
    • gil@gilyehuda.com
    • @gyehuda
  • Dan Keldsen, Information Architected
    • dk@informationarchitected.com
    • 617-933-9655
    • @dankeldson

 

Company History & Facts

  • PBworks was launched in 2005 by David Weekly, who coded the original application in a single night (a lot of work has gone on since then!)
  • The company is the world's largest provider of hosted business and educational workspaces (over 1,000,000 hosted workspaces, over 3,000,000 active users), ahead of other providers like Google Sites.  The company also competes against on-premise software such as Microsoft SharePoint and Jive SBS.
  • PBworks hosts more than three times as many pages of content as the English language version of Wikipedia
  • The main target markets are professional services, agencies, law firms, and education, though the company has many Fortune 500 customers
  • The company has thousands of paying customers using PBworks for partner/client collaboration, project management, intranets, knowledge management, and classroom collaboration
  • Notable customers include FedEx, DePaul University, and the FDA
  • PBworks' investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures, Seraph Group, Sippl Investments, and Ron Conway
  • PBworks has its headquarters in San Mateo, CA, and has a branch office in Nashua, NH

 

Executive Backgrounds

  • Jim Groff, CEO
    • Jim Groff is an accomplished startup CEO who has over 25 years of experience successfully guiding companies to a position of market leadership.  Prior to joining PBworks, Jim was an SVP at Oracle, which he joined as a result of its acquisition of TimesTen, where Jim was CEO.  Prior to TimesTen, Jim held executive positions (including head of its educational business) at Apple Computer, which had acquired Network Innovations Corporation, a company he founded.  Jim has a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.  He is also the author of several best-selling technical books, including Understanding Unix: a Conceptual Guide, and Using SQL.
  • David Weekly, Founder and Chief Product Officer
    • David has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David wrote the first layman's description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David started the company that became PBworks in 2003. He likes to throw hacker parties, fly helicopters, ride his motorcycle, and make useful things.