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As you probably know, JotSpot wikis allow you to go beyond text-only pages and collaborate with rich application pages right in your wiki. You can mix and match text and application page types as needed, from web-based spreadsheets and calendars to photo galleries and email lists. All within a familiar wiki interface.

JotSpot the Platform

This is made possible because under the hood, a JotSpot wiki is actually a web-application platform, complete with a full-power API. This API provides extra “headroom” so you can evolve your wiki into an ever more powerful collaborative environment, beyond a simple set of text pages.

At it’s core, the API allows you to use forms to add structure to information in pages. Once structured, you can use the API to search, manipulate, and report on the info in any way you want. For example, our API was leveraged to customize the JotSpot powered eBay wiki.

In general, the ability to start simply and then evolve as a team is one of the key reasons wikis succeed as collaboration tools. This iterative way of working really benefits from the integration of application pages, which introduce a whole new set of options for organizing and tracking wiki information.

JotSpot Professional Services

The good news about JotSpot’s API is that you can use it to extend your wiki. The bad news about JotSpot’s API is that you may not have the time or skills to take full advantage of it.

Enter JotSpot’s Solution Partners, a network of organizations and individuals that specialize in customizing and extending JotSpot wikis. The partner program is only a handful of months old, but already includes a group of experts who bring a broad cross section of consulting and development experience to new customer projects.

Meet Some of Our Partners and Their Work

Perhaps the best way to introduce our partners and explain some of the services they provide is to take a quick look at some recent public projects. (The majority of partner projects actually involve private, password-protected wikis, which unfortunately can’t be shared.)

» One interesting public project is the Intel Software Network community wiki, which is being customized and extended by partner JotXPert. The project kicked-off by applying Intel’s style to the wiki in order to visually integrate it with other Intel web sites. This styling was handled by partner and CSS specialist Diane Soini, who has custom-branded many wikis.

After the theme work was done, custom article and category functionality was created to accommodate a large collection of migrated content. This information is tied together with other Intel content through an integration with Intel’s tagging and rating systems. The result is a single place on the web where employees and members of the Intel software community can collaborate and share ideas about the best ways to use Intel products.

» Another interesting project involves a community wiki called Ultra Rides, sponsored by Bicycling.com and Michelob Ultra. It was created by partner Knowesys and is a free bike club directory that anyone can edit. As you can see, this project included a highly-customized look and feel in order to create a purpose-built wiki experience for cycling enthusiasts. The flexibility of the JotSpot platform enables custom content communities to meet a very broad set of user experience requirements, in this case combining sponsor-related events with community contributed content.

» In addition to custom communities, partners often create new functionality to complement standard wiki features. Bob Haugen of the newly organized Rising Technologies has worked on a number of such projects, including one with Chordiant. One of Chordiant’s requirements was a custom self-registration feature to enable specific credential checks for new member registration.

Bob’s work with Chordiant also benefitted Jot’s customer community as a whole when Chordiant generously contributed a self-registration application from the project. This type of sharing is another important benefit of JotSpot’s platform approach to wikis.

» While all partners are expert Jot developers, each brings a unique background and specialty to their work. Because of this, partners often team up on projects to bring their specialty to bear, as partners Phil Kast and Diane Soini often do. Phil’s expertise in AJAX and web services and Diane’s in CSS and design have benefitted a number of customer projects.

A Note about Methodology

Our partners typically deliver their projects remotely. This distributed, team-based approach to professional services succeeds in part because JotSpot wikis are used to manage and deliver each engagement. Each engagement leverages the power of wiki and various applications like the JotSpot bug reporter and spreadsheet so all parties stay on the same page and important details don’t slip through the cracks.

The benefits of the JotSpot platform come full circle here because partners can themselves continuously refine and improve their methodology and project wikis based on new lessons learned.

Summary

As you can see I’m really excited about our growing Solution Partner program. I love seeing our customers’ diverse goals and designs become reality in short order.

Our partners play a vital role for customers looking to take advantage of JotSpot’s platform features but for various reasons prefer to engage outside specialists. If you’re interested in learning more about working with our partners or becoming a partner, please email us at partners@jot.com.

jotspot, partners, consulting, professionalservices

Hi, my name is Mark Wubben and I’m a summer intern here at JotSpot. Since I came here last month I’ve been working on an internal project named “Jotliner", which has been released today as the To-Do List application! With the app, you can (of course) create your own to-do lists. The real power, though, is in the way you edit your to-do items. And I don’t mean that you can use the mouse to edit items or re-order them, I’m talking keyboard shortcuts. Tons of ‘em. Quickly move items around, select items, indent, outdent, highlight. Or delete, and then undo, followed by a quick redo. Edit, create new items. Cut or copy, and paste. Check them, and move the checked items to the bottom of the section (called “sifting"). And yes, sections, so you can group items together on one to-do list page. There even is a smart page-lock to prevent someone else from adding items to your list as you’re checking off your completed items. (Although you’ll have to be careful not to edit the same list on two different computers or browsers at the same time). And if you don’t like keyboard shortcuts, everything I just mentioned can be done using the mouse as well.

I could continue talking for a while longer, but you really should give it a try yourself. If you already have a JotSpot wiki version 2.7, which is also known as JotSpot 2.0 and was released July 24th, you can follow the link to “Install applications” down at the bottom of the page. (Make sure you have the permissions to install applications, otherwise it won’t work). This will take you to the Wiki Application Gallery. The To-Do List application is at the bottom of this page. Click “Try it now” to install. If you don’t have the 2.7 wiki, sign up first, and then install.

I would like to conclude this post by thanking David Schontzler, who undertook the original Jotliner project and came up with the interaction model. The app wouldn’t have been here today without his great work. And there’s the brilliant famfamfam.com icon set we’re using for the toolbar icons. As for me, I’m already working on a different project, which I hope to complete before I leave on September 1st. Stay tuned.

Here at Jotspot we have customers using our wiki to support a wide range of group activities. Everybody knows our wiki is great for things like project management, team collaboration, company intranets, book authoring, managing your movie, and more recently, planning your class reunion. We also have customers using it to bring their family together online. We really liked this idea. So we teamed up with Adam Howell (creator of trackslife) and built the Jotspot Family Site.

Best of all, we really liked how Family Site demonstrated the power of our wiki, so we made it free.

With no setup required, the Jotspot Family Site allows you to share a family calendar, see your family on a map, build a family tree, plan your family reunion, share family recipes, and more.

Head on over and check it out.

Mandalan Media recently launched the beta of strmz.com (pronounced “streams"), a JotSpot-powered video clip-sharing destination. Strmz.com features up-to-the minute videos from major media outlets such as NBC, HBO, and Comedy Central, along with popular video blogs and top-rated content from video upload services like Google Video.

Strmz.com is a great example of Jot’s capabilities as a “software as a service platform,” designed to bring a new generation of focused vertical apps and services to market.

Mandalan Media president James Brennan says, “The site uses JotSpot’s wiki software to mashup RSS video feeds, video blogs, and podcasts – and allow members to subscribe to favorite channels, create and share playlists and clips, and export personalized RSS feeds. The site also integrates RSS feed management services provided by FeedBurner to distribute aggregated RSS video channels through popular feed reading services.”

Congrats James and good luck!

Cross-posted from the Jot Developer Connection Blog

Jot’s looking for someone who will apply creative design and engineering rigor to client-side programming. Someone who isn’t afraid to treat JS/DHTML as a real language.

If you’re interested, take a look at some more details and drop us a line at jobs@jot.com. Thanks!

My name is Scott Johnston and I’m addicted to wikis. There. I admitted it. Isn’t that the first step or something?

My addiction began with less dangerous collaboration tools like blogs and discussion groups but using these well known gateway tools I quickly escalated to harder collaboration tools like wikis. Friends started avoiding me, I stopped sleeping and eating, co-workers stopped inviting me to meetings, and loved ones tried to intervene without success. When I heard about Jotspot it seemed like an obvious fit. A place where I could feed my addiction under the guise of a day job. Could it get any more perfect? So after seven years at Kintana, a startup purchased by Mercury interactive in 2002, I tricked Jotspot into hiring me, and fully embraced my addiction.

A little over a year ago we launched the Jotspot wiki. In this time we have learned a lot about the wide variety of uses people have for the application – in fact we have had over 14,000 suggestions. We have talked to customers using our wiki to manage projects, plan events, organize classrooms, run their clubs, manage their knowledgebase, organize their help desk, manage their interview process, just to name a few [1]. I am really excited by how useful people have found the product but also recognize everybody starts with the same blank wiki. Given what we have learned from our customers we would like to provide more out of the box. I think this direction will result in an improved degree of usability and structure while still utilizing the organic, community based wiki. You can think of them as applications with the same genetic code as wikis and then raised by wikis [2].

I came to Jot with one goal: make it easier to work together online and in doing that make wikis work for everybody [3]. I see a wiki as a set of collaboration functions that should be leveraged in a lot of different applications. The great thing about Jot is it was built to allow us to do that. With that I would like to announce the next two Jot apps, in what will be a long line of additions to our suite of applications.

The Jotspot Bug Reporter is a great Bug and Enhancement tracker we have been using internally for awhile now. It is perfect for people that would like instant, hassle free, bug tracking. We focused first on making it really easy to use and quick to create bugs. From this foundation we added features like email notifications, bug creation via email and handhelds, graphical reporting, and a query builder that allows you to publish queries to the main dashboard. Like I was saying earlier this is all built on the Jot platform which means you get all the wiki features like being able to CC a bug to track an email conversation, version history for everything, and simple, one click edit of all aspects of the product. Additionally you get all the Jotspot development API’s that allow you to further change the product to meet your needs.

In a different area, we noticed customers using Jot to plan their reunions. The Jotspot Class Reunion Planner is an application that makes it easier to do just that. This application focused on bringing people together to catch up and reminisce. In addition to a blog, photo gallery, and map that shows where everybody now lives, we also pull in data from external sources to bring back memories of top songs, movies, and other events of the time.

Many more applications are in the pipe so stay tuned. In fact by the time you finish reading this absurdly long post, we might have a few more done.

All for now.

• http://bugreporter.jot.com
• http://classreunion.jot.com

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[1] Without question my favorite use cited by a customer was “Evil plans for world domination, tasty local places for fried mackerel, long tail reactionary musings, conspiracy theories and favorite pickle jar labels I have seen.”

[2] I’m trying to cover those of you that believe in nature, as well as those of you that believe in nurture.

[3] I’ve got my 86 year old Grandma fully hooked on instant messenger so I can be both persistent and patient.