Quick Tip. I just installed Office on my home computer, and thought I’d share a helpful hint. I recommend the following options when installing Microsoft Office on your computer:

WARNING: Failure to disable Sharepoint may lead to missed expectations and general feelings of disappointment & disillusionment.

We’ve been hearing a lot of questions about how PBwiki can be used in the workplace. Rather than offer a boring list of suggestions, we’ve created this cool video to show how WE use PBwiki at our office.

[video]http://youtube.com/watch?v=mGOi42EpHno[/video]

Here are some tips:

1) Don’t email documents to your coworkers and then try to manage and integrate their responses. Instead put your document on the wiki and invite your colleagues to make changes and offer suggestions.

2) Brainstorm your ideas on a wiki — it’s easy to create a cohesive plan once all your ideas have been laid out and reviewed by the team.

3) Eliminate unnecessary follow up meetings by placing your plans on the wiki.

How do YOU use your PBwiki?! We will feature the best response in a PBwiki case study - so be creative!

When I was a student, I was a copious note taker. Where are those notes now? After moving from dorm to apartment to graduate school to San Francisco, those notes are nowhere to be found. Two hours of searching my parent’s attic I located my college photos, my old rice cooker, and several textbooks books. No notes.

Dustin at www.lifehack.org has a great idea - use your wiki for class notes. Here’s how:

Instead of taking notes in class like this:

Transcribe your notes into your wiki (or, for those cutting edge individuals, take notes directly in your wiki).

Why this is an awesome idea that saves you time:

1) Fully legible - not only can you actually read your notes, but formatting with bullet points, bold lettering and headings helps to organize ideas.

2) Share - Easily share you notes with other classmates. Why bother heading to library to photocopy your notes or risk losing them when you lend them to someone? Simply direct people to your wiki page.

3) Link - Add links to relevant articles and websites to create a comprehensive study guide. Don’t try to compile information right before the exam, that’s when you should be chugging coffee and cramming.

3) Search - Locate all your information with the click of a search button. Can your Mead notepad do that? Not yet!

Check out the many other cool reasons you should use a wiki to take your notes on www.Lifehack.org

I agree with you! It’s a huge pain to keep track of shared office documents. I am forced to figure out - does this document reflect the most recent changes? Was this version approved by the board? Has the team signed off on this document? Grr!

A wiki is a great way to cut down on that frustration. Here’s how I used my wiki to collaborate on my recent proposal for a city grant:

I started by posting the most recent revision of my grant on the wiki. To do this I just cut and pasted my original word document.

I invited others to collaborate on my project. It took my team a few weeks to get used to the idea that the document was always updated and always on the wiki. After a few weeks of responding to request for the documents with, “Check the Wiki!� everyone caught on.

It’s easy to keep track of revisions. By checking the document history, I can see who made changes and when they were made.

Rather than editing the document and emailing it to the team, I simply edit our shared wiki. Everyone receives notification that the wiki was updated and knows where to find the most recent copy. In the end my document was revised by three different departments, and I wasn’t wasting my time trying to keep track of every iteration. Fantastic!

How this saved me time:

1) I no longer have to search through email to find the most recent document, or figure out what I named the most recent copy on my desktop – my most up to date work is always on the wiki.

2) Finding old copies of the same document is simple, they’re always saved in the revision history. Again no more searching through past email or copies saved on my desktop.

3) Instead of receiving tons emails with revised documents, I’m notified when a change takes place. It’s easy to track what was changed and who made the changes (Less email noise!)

Here’s a great new feature especially handy for our businesses, education, and government users: Access-via-email lets you set an email domain, and anyone with an email under that domain can grant themselves Contributor access to your wiki. An example will make this a lot more obvious - here at PBwiki we run a bunch of internal wikis and this feature makes it easy to set up self-service — no more “hey, what’s the password for that wiki?” with new employees and new wikis. I set ‘@pbwiki.com’ in the ‘Access via email’ section of the wiki settings and now anyone on the PBwiki team can let themselves in using their name@pbwiki.com address. Easy!

The “Access via email” feature is available for all Silver, Gold, and Platinum wikis (it depends on the wiki being configured with a Contributor user level).

The PBwiki team is on our annual office offsite, and we’ve been spending lots of quality time together brainstorming about new product possibilities, ways to make PBwiki more useful to our users, and how to make PBwiki the obvious answer for your online collaborative needs. In addition to the longer-term strategic planning and such, we’ve also been doing some late-night hacking of ‘hey, you know what would be cool…’ features and enhancements — ideas we’ve had in our heads for a while but weren’t fleshed-out enough for prime-time or didn’t fit into the development schedule.

Tonight we’ve deployed the results of some kung-fu from last night, a new feature for premium wikis. All of your wiki’s pages are stored in memory, ready for display to you and to search through. While we’ve got a super-efficient distributed file storage for every page revision and attachment (millions!), it’s still on disks on remote machines. We’re restricting this to paying customers because it consumes by far the most expensive resource on our servers, RAM. There’s no downside for non-premium wikis and we’re not making them any slower. As we build out our server hardware we’ll make sure we have enough RAM to accommodate all of the premium wikis this way in addition to our normal caching mechanisms.

The result: Pages on premium wikis load 10-40% faster depending on size, and searches are up to 10 times faster. We’re pretty happy with the new speed boost, and think you will be too.

The PBwiki team is Colorado for our annual offsite this week, and on top of a bunch of regular work we’re doing a couple of great activities — here’s some photos from our paintball session this morning.

(more…)

[Edit: We removed this after trying it out for a few weeks!]

Now you can follow the daily activities of the PBwiki crew - realtime! PBwiki makes fairly heavy use of IM already, so we built an IM bot that forwards certain messages to our newest wiki page. This means the page will receive tons of fresh insight into our inner minds. (Note: This may frighten small children!) But we think it is important to find new and useful ways to keep the PBwiki community updated on what we are up to. Enjoy!

I’ve been running some internal stats on the various activity levels across the PBwiki landscape. This set of numbers breaks categories down by volume of activity rather than unique users.

How much activity on private versus public wikis?

Around 2/3 of our activity is on private wikis. Takeaway: Our users have found lots of uses for PBwiki that we don’t know about, and we’d love to hear your stories.

How much activity on free versus premium wikis?

More than 16% of user activity is on premium wikis. Takeaway: Lots of people are taking advantage of our great premium features and enhanced security. Yay!

How much activity among major browser families?

Around 56% IE, 39% Firefox, 5% Safari, <1% everybody else.

How much activity over SSL versus unencrypted?

5.5% of our activity is over end-to-end SSL, which is available for our Platinum and custom SMB and business packages. Lots of companies trust PBwiki with their most sensitive documents.

And Fridays are very serious.

Apparently some kid by our local Vietnamese place was making balloon … pbj sandwiches. They’re not usually that chewy.