I’m enrolled in a six-month entrepreneurship project course in the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford. My team is using PBwiki to manage our team’s collaboration. PBwiki is a website that lets you create your own wikis for the public or for private use. PBwiki’s tagline is “Make a PBwiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich,” and we’ve found that pretty accurate.
My team has been extremely happy with our experience at PBwiki. It was really easy to set up a wiki and start using it. There was almost no learning curve, even for the non-technical members of our team. It really has been a breeze, and I think the non-engineers on my team particularly appreciate that.
On the downside, I’m generally paranoid about vendor lock-in, and we’re getting pretty locked into PBwiki as we expand our content. I’d like the option of moving to another wiki platform at some point. There is a way to backup your data, but it would be pretty difficult to import that into another wiki.
Also, our project’s title uses “CamelCase”, and PBwiki automatically turns every CamelCase word into a hyperlink. There is a workaround, but it’s a little frustrating.
Anyway, I’ve been really happy with PBwiki myself, so I encourage all of you to try PBwiki for group collaboration. If you’re building a long-term collection of data, though, you might want to host your own wiki so that you can avoid the vendor lock-in problem.
Disclaimer: PBwiki offered us additional storage space in exchange for a blog post about their service.
