Customervision has recently launched a new free entry level wiki service called RapidWiki. RapidWiki is a basic version of the enterprise wiki BizWiki. I just received the login for my new RapidWiki site.

On the homepage the menu items are displayed on the left, and there is a What’s new box below the article text. A new page can be easily made by clicking on ‘New Page’ in the menu. To structure your wiki it is possible to categorise the articles. Customervision uses the open source WYSIWYG editor called FCK Editor. This editor is used in a lot of wiki solutions. It works very well and almost looks like Word. Another big advantage of the editor is that it is quite easy to add new buttons with features you develop yourself.

So what distinguishes Customervision’s RapidWiki from other wiki offerings? Some features, like inserting Word documents, are very interesting. However, I didn’t get it to work in my Firefox browser. Another feature is the status of the article which can be private or published. When an article is published it will be visible for the rest of the world, when it is private only logged-in users can view the article.

I think that RapidWiki is a good tool, but compared to other wiki packages I think it has nothing that makes this software exceptional. My first opinion of the wiki was that it looks very basic and not very attractive. The layout of the edit page is not very intuitive, it looks very much like different pieces of software put together. They should hire a designer to make the wiki look better. I also do not really see the advantage of workflows and publishing, a wiki is not a cms, the philosophy is to allow every user to edit and create articles. I do think that the possibility to publish articles is a very easy way to communicate to the outside world, but is this a feature you want to have? Why don’t you use this enterprise wiki for open internal communication within a company and use something else like a blog for external communication?

Customervision offers extensive options to easily integrate the wiki with the company’s existing security infrastructure, including LDAP and Active Directory. Also SSL authentication is provided.

Pros:

• it has all the basic wiki features
• extensive usage statistics
• My Place is a dashboard like place with relevant infomation for the user
• extensive options to easily integrate the wiki with the company’s existing security infrastructure

Cons:

• not very intuitive
• ugly
• insert word document doesn’t work in firefox/mac
• Writing a summary and summary of change while editing is in my opinion superfluous