At this point, almost everyone on the planet has heard of Wikipedia, and people both inside and outside the IT profession appreciate that Wikipedia is an enormously large and popular example of an easily accessible infrastructure that supports sharing and collaboration of documents among a distributed group of individuals.

But fewer people understand how wikis are created and maintained, and what kind of hardware and software is needed to support them. If you point out that in order to operate a wiki, there has to be a server somewhere, and that it requires installing and configuring some open-source software such as MediaWiki or TWiki, most IT professionals will shrug dismissively and say,”Duh … so? What’s the big deal?” But if you say this to non-IT folks who think it would be cool to set up some wikis for collaborative efforts, they’re likely to slowly back away and say, “Ugh — that sounds geeky. We don’t have the time or the resources to learn that stuff, and it sounds like it would be a nuisance to maintain and support it.”

And if you point out that if also requires a certain degree of geek-level knowledge to create new pages in a collaborative document, or to edit an existing document, you’ll get more groans from a non-IT audience. Even more groans ensue if you point out that the WYSIWYG formatting that we take for granted in our word processors probably won’t exist in their wiki environment, and that they’ll have to do a little work to accomplish the formatting — much as we once had to do with editing of HTML syntax in NotePad before tools like DreamWeaver came along. And there are likely to be even more groans if you tell them their wiki is restricted to just text documents, and that they can’t create calendars, tables or simple spreadsheets.

Enter JotSpot. In a nutshell, the company provides both a hosted wiki environment (meaning they worry about the installation and maintenance of the server, not you), and a fully installable wiki environment (meaning you can install it behind the firewall in your own organization) that provides a user-friendly, WYSIWYG set of tools for creating and sharing with the kind of documents that serve as the basis for common collaboration — i.e., text-based documents, group calendars, and garden-variety spreadsheets.

I had figured all of this out just by surfing around JotSpot’s website, thereby demonstrating that you really don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what it’s all about; and since I’m seriously considering revising one of my textbooks in a wiki format (so that students and professors all over the world can contribute to the revisions and updates), I spent some time studying a comparable project that’s hosted on JotSpot: Larry Lessig’s revision to his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. (the revision, titled Code: Version 2.0, is currently scheduled for publication on December 30, 2006; you can pre-order it from Amazon now). But I thought it would be a good idea to get a deeper understanding of what the company is doing, and what its vision of Web 2.0 is all about, so I spent an interesting hour meeting with Ken North, JotSpot’s Vice President of Products, during my week of visits in Silicon Valley.

Ken told me that the company launched its product in October 2004, so it’s probably not appropriate to call it a “startup” any more. While they’ve got a free Family Wiki that has apparently attracted 1,500 families, the company is aiming primarily at small to mid-size companies, with a few impressive installations at large organizations like eBay, Symantic, Intel, and Whole Foods. Small companies have the same collaboration problems as large companies — indeed, perhaps even more so, because today’s small companies are often distributed and “virtual,” with relatively few (if any) employees clustering together in the same office space.

But small companies, for obvious reasons, don’t have the resources or expertise of large companies whose IT departments can handle the geeky tasks mentioned above — setting up servers, installing open-source software, configuring and tuning the wiki software, and providing maintenance and support. So, a hosted wiki environment (where JotSpot does all the work), with prices ranging from a modest $9.95 per month for a 10-user “mini” wiki, all the way up to a company-sized wiki with 5,000 pages and unlimited users for $199.95 per month, is an attractive option.

All of that made good sense to me, but I was curious about the reaction from large organizations: why wouldn’t they just install their own wikis, especially since there are several different products (click here to see a comparison between roughly 30 such products) available as free, open-source products? Indeed, why wouldn’t one expect to see resistance and hostility from IT departments in large organizations, since they typically have a track record of having resisted departmental websites in the late 90s, client-server systems in the early 90s, and departmental PCs in the 80s?

Ken made the interesting observation that many IT departments already have wikis for their own use, and they’ve already seen the benefit of eliminating the bottleneck of a single “web master” who was responsible for updating shared Intranet documents — and instead using the infrastructure of a wiki to support sharing and collaborating. So they’re far less likely to be opposed to the idea of end-user departments (e.g., sales, accounting, marketing, engineering, HR) installing a wiki; and while they could install the same open-source software that their own techie geeks are using, there’s an obvious attractiveness to the user-friendly UI that JotSpot provides for WYSIWYG editing of documents, support for spreadsheets and calendars, etc.

Indeed, such corporate users are likely to demand WYSIWYG text-editing, as well as basic spreadsheet capabilities, calendar and meeting-management capabilities, simple workflow capabilities, the ability to manage expense accounts, and even basic project management — all within a sharable, collaborative framework. Several of these capabilities are available from other vendors — Google and Microsoft come to mind, and Apple will apparently introduce some form of wiki support in the next release of their Mac OS X operating system — but JotSpot feels they’ve got the best integration of all these functions.

That was certainly true when the company’s product was introduced in 2004, and is arguably still true today; whether it continues to be true in the next year or two is anyone’s guess, especially as the 800-pound gorillas like Google and Microsoft flex their muscles. But for now, Jotspot’s Norton argues that their biggest competition is not Microsoft, but the “status quo” — i.e., the absence of any collaborative tools or environments in most small to medium sized companies.

It appears that JotSpot is going to continue focusing most of its efforts and investments in additional tools and technologies, rather than building a large consulting staff to support the installation, customization, and ongoing hand-holding that some of the medium-size customers may need once they move beyond the basic forms of collaboration. Instead, JotSpot has teamed up with about a dozen consulting organizations, and four business partners, to provide that kind of support; it’s a common strategy for software product development firms, and as long as they’ve chosen their partners carefully, it should work.

As far as technology development goes, it’s interesting that JotSpot has nurtured an external developer community to help provide some of the add-on applications that you can see show-cased here. All of this takes advantage of a technology platform that JotSpot built itself — i.e., the company decided not to use open-source resources like MediaWiki — and which they feel will provide a better foundation for ongoing application enhancement. I obviously didn’t examine any of JotSpot’s code, but Norton tell ms that they’re using many of the familiar Web 2.0 technologies — e.g., Ajax and server-side Javascript.

As with most of the other visits I made to Web 2.0 companies this week, I wrapped up my meeting by asking Norton what he thought was in store for the future; Jotspot’s CEO Joe Kraus joined the meeting at this point and contributed his thoughts, too. Both agreed the that “software as service” paradigm, represented by JotSpot’s hosted capabilities, would become mainstream and pervasive; they feel that it has now been accepted as a viable approach. And they both agreed that more and more work — and the various productivity tools to support day-to-day business work — will be shifting to mobile platforms (e.g., smart, Internet-enabled cellphones), but that’s too early to tell how this will impact the development of specific tools and products.

More important, Horton believes that companies will begin looking at wikis and other collaborative tools not just as a way of avoiding the losses and inefficiencies associated with today’s non-collaborative work environment, and will start looking for ways to use collaboration to gain productivity enhancements, competitive differentiation, and other benefits.

Kraus believes that an important aspect of this gain will come from what he calls “Do It Yourself” (DIY) applications, which will represent a level of sophistication greater than the Excel spreadsheets that everyone knows how to create today, and less than the Java/C++ programs that only professional programmers know how to create. The same kind of thing happened 20 years ago in the publishing field, he argues, when laser printers and WYSIWYG editors created an intermediate level of sophistication and functionality between the primitive functionality of typewriters, and the high-end functionality provided by professional typesetters.

It’s an intriguing view of the future, and it’s certainly compatible with the Web 2.0 philosophy of empowering individuals to create their own materials, rather than serving as passive consumers of materials created by a professional priesthood. I look forward to coming back to JotSpot in a year or so to see how they’re doing.