Public Swikis

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Dec 18 14:56:40 UTC 1999


>So, our firm's IT department is *FINALLY* thinking about internets. 
>I showed the guy your site, and the Squeak swiki, and he's been 
>playing around with it somewhat.  His answer was along the lines of, 
>"so what's the difference between this and giving each team member a 
>copy of frontpage or some similar thing?"
>
>Now that you are in the business of selling this stuff, how do you 
>sell it (on features at least)?

At Georgia Tech, we get this question quite frequently.  Our answer 
boils down to two points:
- FrontPage plus an NT server is a nice Webpage-creation 
solution...for a Windows environment.  Here at Tech, about 30% of the 
students run Linux, almost all the rest run 95/98/NT, about half the 
faculty have Sun or SGI workstations on their desk, and much of the 
other half has Macs.  If I pick a platform, I lose an important 
segment of my potential audience.
- And even a FrontPage et al. solution doesn't come off nearly as 
nice for collaborative work as a Wiki-like space.  *Your page* is a 
very easy way for me to connect from my space to your space.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list