[9:09pm] If you’re getting a “read only” message on your wiki, our engineers are performing unscheduled maintenance and are currently working to restore full wiki access. We estimate restoring full access by 1am PST.

Your data is safe.

We’ll continue updating this post with the newest developments. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and we’ll respond right away.

[11:37pm] We’ve revised our timeline and expect to restore full access to wikis by 4am PST. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please see some of the Q&A in the comments (below). If you have any other questions, please leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you.

[1:42am] Great news: We’ve restored access to your wikis. You should be able to access your wiki now.

If you have any questions or notice any irregularities, please click “Help” in your wiki. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience — we all worked around the clock to restore full access to your wikis.

Our educators portal has some great examples of teachers actively using wikis to build class networks, improve student learning and encourage open discussion and collaboration.

But how did all these teachers get to this point?

If you find yourself asking this question, we’re here to help! Tune in to tomorrow’s webinar to find out the best way build your own remote classroom and engage your students

We’re going to share community tips on classroom management, building a classroom community, and how to design group work on your wiki. Learn how to use our new PBwiki 2.0 features to create private team pages, change student access controls, and more.

You can sign up for our webinar here.

So you’ve created your first PBwiki.  Now the question is, how do you get the rest of your organization to adopt it?

We’re here to help.  Just this week, I held a webinar on “Driving Adoption of PBwiki“.  For an hour, we talked about how you can use the four keys to driving adoption (structure, resources, workflow, and rewards) to make PBwiki an integral part of how your team works.

If you missed the webinar, no worries, the recording is available here.  And even if you don’t have a full hour to watch the webinar, you can go to the Driving Adoption Wiki, download my full presentation ( AdoptingPBwiki.ppt) and learn at your own pace.

Good luck!

Feeling adventurous? We’re building a team of PBwiki users to help us test out new features before they go live for everyone. We need about 100 testers who know their way around a wiki and aren’t afraid of the cutting edge.

If you’re interested in trying out new things ahead of time, don’t mind the occasional glitch, and are interested in giving us feedback, you can apply here. We can’t wait to hear from you.

We just finished up another great webinar today, focused on using PBwiki for project management.  We spent an hour going over how you can use PBwiki templates and folders to build your own project management system, and answered a whole bunch of questions from users.

To watch this and other recorded webinars, or to sign up for future webinars, be sure to visit our webinars page.

Today we’re announcing an executive’s guide to the 7 must-have elements of every successful wiki initiative. It’s perfect for executives and project managers introducing collaboration solutions into the workplace.

This guide to seven proven wiki essentials distills best practices, lessons learned, and collective insights from PBwiki’s 30,000+ business customers—as well as industry experts—across various company sizes, geographies, and vertical markets.

Here’s a sample page for you to check out (click to enlarge):

Download the free white paper here.

As y’all might have noticed from our Web site, PBwiki is now conducting regular webinars to help folks learn how they can use PBwiki to make their lives better: http://pbwiki.com/content/webinars

The reaction to these webinars has been so positive, that now we’d like to expand them to include PBwiki users.

If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming PBwiki webinar, please leave a comment on this post.

If you’re an expert using PBwiki in your work, or if PBwiki has made a big difference in your life, we might want you to star in our next webinar. For example, one upcoming webinar will feature a leading professional organizer, who will talk about how you can use PBwiki to organize your life.

This is especially perfect for professionals who would like a way to reach PBwiki’s loyal user base of millions.

So if you think you have what it takes to co-host a PBwiki webinar, leave a comment, or email me, Chris Yeh, at chris dot yeh at pbwiki dot com.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing your name in lights.

P.S. As I mentioned in my last webinar on templates, if you have a template that you’ve created that you think really kicks ass, let me know. We might just add it PBwiki (named after you, of course!).

P.P.S. If you’d like to be featured in a webinar and reach millions of PBwiki users — and PBwiki has made a big difference in your life — please leave a comment on this post.

We’ve received tons of emails from beta users requesting to transfer their 1.0 wikis to the new PBwiki 2.0.

We’ve already invited a limited number people to transition their wiki, and we’re excited to allow a few more users the opportunity to transfer to a PBwiki 2.0.

When you transition you will be able to access our new features:
• Improved Editor
• Folders
• Page Level Access

Things to know when transitioning your wiki:
• Users must have a PBwiki account - currently 2.0 wikis do not use the invite key
• Custom CSS wikis will need to use the new color picker tool to customize your wiki.
• Your wiki may display differently in 2.0

Most importantly, when you switch to PBwiki 2.0 you won’t be able to revert back to 1.0.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone that signed up for the migration trial. We’ll be reaching out to you over the next few days to make this happen.

I was having lunch yesterday with some friends, when the subject turned to questions and answers.  My friend had attended a conference panel, and complained that the panelists all failed to adequately answer her question.

(In defense of those panelists, the question was a difficult one without a clear right answer.)

I proceeded to answer the question, much to her satisfaction, and she asked me afterwards, “How do you give good answers to tough questions?”  I thought you marketers out there might be interested in my response.

1) Make sure you understand the question.  When someone asks me a question, I listen carefully, both to the words, and to the unspoken assumptions.  Two people might ask the exact same question in exactly the same words, but my answers to them would differ depending on tone, body language, and my history with that person.

2) Start your thinking broad, and narrow it down.  As I listen to questions, my brain is constantly jumping ahead, thinking about the various possible paths the question (and my answer) might take.  It’s a bit like watching a search box autocomplete, gradually narrowing down potential answers as I type.  That way, rather than searching for a single right answer and not knowing where to start, I simply winnow my down to the truth.

3) Always directly answer the question, even if the answer is “I don’t know” or “I can’t tell you that.”  I always give a direct response.  Unless you’re really slick, it’s unlikely the questioner will forget what they actually asked, and your attempts at evasion will simply madden them and reduce their estimation of you.

4) Make your answer interactive.  Just as I’m constantly making mental adjustments as I listen to the question, it’s wise to follow the same approach when answering.  Give one part of your answer, and check for agreement.  There’s no sense in erecting a massive rhetorical edifice if the listener disagrees with your basic assumptions.

5) Check afterwards to see if the questioner feels satisfied.  You’re answering the question, so you don’t have to stop until you feel like it.  Don’t let the desire to finish override the real goal, which is to convey understanding.  If it takes a little more time, better a longer response than an unconvincing one.

Want to see my answering techniques in action?  Attend our upcoming webinars:

Over the past couple weeks our users have been hard at work testing all the great new features in PBwiki 2.0. We’ve received a ton of positive feedback -

“I find the UI to be something that both engineers and graphic designers would love.”

“Well done folks, even more straight forward than your ‘Point and Click’ editor.”

“It’s a beautiful site, really easy to use. Awesome that you’ve made it freely available.”

More than that our beta testers have helped us identify and squash a bucketful of bugs and made dozens of excellent suggestions for ways we can make PBwiki 2.0 even better.

I’m the guy who gets to read all your Beta Feedback and I wanted to say thanks to all our users for exploring PBwiki 2.0 so thoroughly. Also I wanted to give you just an idea of the long list of bugs that have been fixed thanks to you:

• There are now templates for new pages
• Linking to email addresses is fixed
• Page history is retrievable for all pages
• It’s easy to delete comments
• Email addresses are not visible to anonymous users
• Readers and Writers can not delete pages

This is a small sample from a mountain of help you’ve given us. All thanks to our fabulous beta testers!

If you haven’t yet seen a PBwiki 2.0 Beta wiki, create one now!