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Whether you're looking to foster creativity or cut down on e-mail, wikis are a great addition to the office workspace. These collaborative spaces give everyone a place to share thoughts and work on projects, and are simple enough for even non-technical people to use. We recently looked at JotSpot, a wiki solution for businesses. Now we'll explore SocialText, a similar service that combines the powers of wikis and blogs for a winning blend.

If you're new to the term, know that wikis are fluid pages that any reader can edit or add, and which can always be rolled back to a previous version. Writing text or adding new pages is simple. While wikis have a plain Jane look that can be difficult to adjust to, users quickly get up to speed and use them for all manner of collaboration.

SocialText provides everything we've come to expect in a wiki solution and more. The basics are there: you can edit anything you see with just a click, and make simple formatting commands. SocialText also lets you add images or attachments to a page. Once you've created a new page, you can categorize it, so that it will be grouped with other similar pages.

Users can create a new page in SocialText by simply writing a standard page entry and putting the name of the new page in square brackets. When that entry is saved, the new page name becomes a link; click on that link and you'll get an editing box for the new page. There's no coding required. Users can subscribe to a site via an RSS link, so that they're always notified when a site has been changed.

When working with an existing page in SocialText, you can always edit the text or write a comment that will appear after the text. Click the History link to see all the versions of a page, which you can then click to compare side-by-side. If you think someone else's new changes weren't a good idea, you can quickly restore an older version of the page.

You don't even have to be in the office to use SocialText, since it lets you send in a new page by e-mail. The title of your e-mail becomes the subject line and the message becomes the body text. Don't worry that your new page won't be linked from any of the existing pages - other users can find it from the Recent Changes page, which is the usual way in a wiki to find out what's new.

Besides wiki functions, SocialText adds blog functionality, so you can make a blog page with the same ease. Blog pages display comments in chronological order and give users an easy way to hold a discussion online.

If you're wondering whether or not your staff would use a wiki effectively, try the 30-day trial at www.socialtext.com and find out. Most groups start out using SocialText to communicate about a specific project or prepare documentation, but usage grows as they discover how it can help with other tasks.

SocialText offers both hosted and installed solutions. For a hosted wiki, the cost is a flat $10 per person per month. If you're concerned about security and you'd like the wiki behind your own firewall, the application costs a one-time $10,000 fee for 10 users. Additional users cost $40 per person per month, but that amount decreases with volume.

SocialText's interface is simple and uncluttered, and every page can be edited by the users.