Wikis for the Average User

By Ben Kepes on September 27, 2008

I know it's an unpalatable thought for many people reading this
blog, but most enterprise users feel remarkable comfortable in the MS
Word environment. Getting them to feel that comfortable within a Wiki
world is a challenge.

Atlassian Confluence has taken a big step to easing their pain by delivering their Office Connector functionality.

The Office Connector integrates the Wiki with Microsoft Office.
Users can edit Wiki pages in any of the relevant MS Office products
(Word, Excel, Powerpoint). It's a simple change that is highly
user-centric – fact is that people are used to editing Word documents –
this change allows them to do just that – the fact that behind the
scenes they're actually editing a Wiki makes no difference at the
user's front-end.

The screenshot below shows what the user sees, and shows how easy it is to just select "edit in word".

I harp on about user-centricity but only because I firmly believe
that to really leverage the value of Enterprise 2.0, we need to focus
fairly and squarely on the average (ie non tech-savvy) user. Well done
to Atlassian to reacting to this.

For an insight into how simple the connector works, check out this Atlassian video;