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People who use the Internet or intranet at work are often blissfully unaware of the technology beneath the networks and applications they are using. And that's fine. People regularly use automobiles, airplanes, and appliances without understanding how they work, just that they do the job.

Wikis aren't any different. The tech-savvy and the early adopters find wikis to be a valuable tool for collaboration. They allow anyone to edit information and contribute to a document. If you're not a technical person, however, they can be a bear to set up.

When JotSpot launched last year, its goal was to create a platform on which people could build wiki-type applications. Last month, the company released JotSpot Tracker, an application that allows users to collaborate on Excel spreadsheets online.

Excel is easy to create data in, said JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus, but it's not easy to build applications on top of Excel. Yet the way many people work with Excel is an ugly form of application building and collaboration via e-mail attachments. It leads to multiple versions, among other problems.

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"The marriage of, essentially, spreadsheet and wiki was something people were trying to do, Kraus told Intranet Journal. "They were trying to force them into wikis."

JotSpot Tracker not only allows users to cut and paste Excel data into a wiki-type application, but each cell in the spreadsheet is essentially its own page. Cells can hold data, attachments, and notes from collaborators. Have a field with addresses? Map them using Google Maps right in the spreadsheet.

JotSpot launched a couple of vertical applications last year while testing its concept. There is a bug tracker for development teams and a class reunion application that lets people work together to plan an event.

"The idea is, we learned in 2005 what people do with their wikis," Kraus said. "The problem was you started with a blank page." JotSpot's plan relied on what Kraus sees as two long-term trends in the software business.

Kraus, who was one of the co-founders of Internet portal Excite, expects do-it-yourself technology to be around for quite some time. Blogs, Web content management, podcasts, and e-commerce are all tasks that Internet users do on their own. "I think it's a long-term, 10-year trend," Kraus said.

Kraus is also a big believer in software as a service, and wanted that to be a big part of the JotSpot value proposition. JotSpot Tracker is free for the personal version (two trackers and five users) and $9.99 per month for the pro version (10 trackers and unlimited users). All users need is a couple of minutes and a credit card. There's no need to involve tech people or complete an installation. The price is also what Kraus calls "expensable, not approvable," meaning customers can charge it to an expense account and get it into their organizations.

JotSpot isn't alone when it comes to moving familiar applications to the Web. Web-based word processors like Writely are designed for unstructured data, whereas JotSpot Tracker focuses on structured data.

Microsoft's Office Live initiative, launched in November, also has the attention of the JotSpot crew. "Microsoft has every intention of putting Excel on the Web," Kraus said.

To differentiate from the world's largest software maker, Kraus described JotSpot's plan as one that will "embrace and extend" traditional Excel. Users are invited to take part in a JotSpot Tracker using e-mail; they can be designated certain rights; and there's version control. "We're not trying to just be Excel on the Web," Kraus said.

We can expect to see more applications built on the wiki platform from JotSpot in the future, Kraus said, as it looks to spread collaboration without the complexity.

JotSpot Tracker makes structured data from spreadsheets into applications that can be annotated and shared without the use of e-mail.

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