2

CustomerVision's BizWiki provides users with a polished set of tools for creating and managing content collaboratively, although some of the administrative features are a bit raw.

The Wiki-based BizWiki is a hosted application that allows companies to manage documentation in the context of relationships with business partners and customers, as well as internally.

Introduced in April, BizWiki can get to be expensive—as much as $5,000 per month for an unlimited number of named or logged-in users. However, during eWeek Labs' tests, the application provided very good content creation and editing tools, along with good workflow for managing content revisions and approval. Managing the system, though, could be a bit obtuse at times.

The father of the Wiki speaks out on community and collaborative development. Click here to read more.

BizWiki segments content by containers, each of which describes the type of content and the content's audience. We could also define content state in three ways: as draft; live and not public; and live and public.

It's BizWiki's content-level controls that give the application the stuff it needs to effectively manage information by audience—useful for applications such as managing a knowledge base.

Through the level control, we could define the role of a given user as a function of how he or she relates to content. For example, we could create a partner level to provide a way for partners to contribute changes to a knowledge-base article without giving them outright control over content and workflow.

Content state also factors into workflow—for example, when a user contributes an article but lacks publish rights, the article is defined as a draft and becomes available for promotion by a user with higher permissions.