Intranet Journal
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Central Desktop Offers Wikis Without the Wiki
Troy Dreier
8/31/2005
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Look around the Central Desktop Web site and you'll never see the "W" word. In this case, "W" stands for "wiki," and you won't find it anywhere, even though Central Desktop is built on a wiki engine and provides exactly the kind of easy collaboration features that wikis are known for.
That's because the team behind Central Desktop believes that "wiki" — while the buzzword of the moment for the technorati — is still a foreign concept for most people. The word makes wikis sound foreign and difficult to those who haven't tried them. Besides that, wiki markup language can be too difficult for non-techies. The idea behind Central Desktop is to improve on the wiki foundation and give people an online collaboration tool that simply works, no special training required.
Now in pre-release stage, Central Desktop will launch on Sept. 1. It's the sole product of Central Desktop, Inc., a young company helmed by start-up veterans who sold their previous companies to CNET. The idea to focus on improving business collaboration came from their own experiences, as they didn't think that any of the companies now rushing to fill the space did a good enough job of making online collaboration simple and inexpensive for small teams.
Download Central Desktop's free trial and you'll first notice how clear and simple the interface is. As with any wiki, every page is easily editable, and adding new pages is a snap. Page formatting commands are lined up at the top of every editing window, so that users won't need to know any special wiki markup tags. You can add images or documents to your pages. Central Desktop's search engine will index the contents of attached text, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files, so that you can easily search on content even when you don't know the file's name.
You can also add special features, called "blocks," to your pages by clicking a button at the top of the editing window. Blocks let you add elements like a discussion forum, RSS feed, task list, milestone, or calendar to a page with only a few clicks. The company plans to roll out more blocks in the future.
Finding content with Central Desktop is easier than with other wiki products because of the organizational tabs along the top of each screen. If you know you want to find a certain discussion thread, but don't want to drill down through the content pages to find it, you can simply click the Discussions tab to see all the discussions going on. Other tabs are labeled Files, Tasks, Milestones, and Calendar. You can also view all of your Central Desktop project sites from your personal Dashboard page, so you can quickly go between areas.
Central Desktop is purely a hosted solution, using 128-bit SSL security and running only on standard ports to address security concerns. Pricing hasn't been determined as of this writing, but the pricing structure will set the amount of storage and the number of workspaces that a company can have, letting them add as many users as they like. A company representative told us that most small teams could expect to pay around $75 to $200 per month for the service.
Central Desktop offers the clarity and ease of a traditional wiki, but without confusing wiki markup coding.
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