You may either work completely from within the office suite that will take care of basic workflows as well as versioning of documents you work on during a session. It also comes with an AJAX base web client. In the background there's a J2EE based server built on top of Apache Tomcat and the PostgreSQL that takes care of the document store.

They've got a time restricted demo VMware appliance that you can download here. They've got a short presentation video that shows the basics of the web client.

A nice idea is to deliberately open a workspace and get a tab at the bottom for it. A workspace in a way maps on TWiki's webs. But instead of having to deal with all webs at the same time every user can just open ``his'' workspaces in O3Spaces and concentrate on them. Despite all the technical merits that come with O3Spaces I like those little usability improvements that make a big difference.

The portal page of a workspace is build up from little areas where specific information is listed (latest changes, recent comments, etc). But why do they have to create yet another XXXlet name for it: ``Spacelets'' from the outer regions of Ursa Minor. So spacelets are in a way portlets. Besides other conceptual parallels, they share the same potential for gooseflesh.

The screenshot shows three pulldown menus to select a workspace, files and discussions in it ... which makes me wonder how this interface scales when the number of documents and discussions in it grows. Unfortunately the presentation does not show how documents can be organized, e.g. classifying and tagging them. The spacelets only show latest changes but don't provide a path to find ``relevant'' information whatever that is. So as good as O3Spaces might be in collaborative document creation it may lack components essential to manage long-term knowledge.

Anyway, go ahead download the test version and make up your own mind.

Well, it depends. Everybody has a blog. So at least it seems so. And now it is our turn to start babbling blogging. But we will not be talking about our personal daily struggle to survive life. Moreover, we -- the WikiRing partners -- are all working on very exciting stuff right now and want to keep you informed about it. We will not or even can not talk about every project that we are on right now but give you pieces of sugar from time to time even before we finally release things making it downloadable. We will also talk about things interesting for our clients as well as feature projects once they are finished.

The first posting is by Sven "TWiki skin demo using Css Zen Garden" showing a new approach to customize TWiki easily using pre-existing art work.

More to come. Stay tuned. (Could not resist those memes).

While things started on private hardware behind an ADSL linkup we now got the full bandwidth of professional hosting. In addition I bought the wikiring.de domain to make up the complete WikiRing experience, even in Germany. So while Sven takes care of wikiring.com on dreamhost I will do my part and bring this server into the partnership.

Part of the services offered on the old jojowiki.dyndns.org domain will move to dedicated virtual hosts. The only thing that still bothers me is the name of this site -- ``JojoWiki'' -- that I'd like to change. Maybe I will come up with a new domain name and then things will move again, at least virtually.