Writely is definitely on to something. I’d tried web word processors and generally been underwhelmed. But Writely has gotten two things right that it’s predecessors generally haven’t.

The first key feature is an aggressive autosave feature that gives you utter confidence that you won’t lose your work due to a browser crash or navigation. An online indicator assures you of the last time the document was autosaved. Built in versioning allows you to roll back to any previous version of the document or compare versions to see what changed.

The second killer feature is collaboration. Writely allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time and merges their changes in real time. It lets each collaborator know about the other authors currently working with the document. (Some sort of lightweight buddy IM system would also be very interesting, so that you see which other collaborators were online and chat with them. Meebo meets Writely, anyone?) I need to get some more experience in the how the auto merging works out in practice (will we get merge conflicts?), but the value proposition is compelling.

The other built in advantage, of course, is roaming; I can access my document from any PC. As the number of PCs proliferate, this becomes increasingly important.

Also nice is principle is the feature that allows you to save your document as a Word or OpenOffice document. The only problem with this feature is that it inserted a number of extra blank lines in the document, which seems to be the bane of HTML editors everywhere. Hopefully they can fix this bug.

The enterprise wiki system Confluence 2.0 is now available. Some key new features include rich text editing and tagging.

Jobster has been a heavy user of Confluence; we have thousands of pages in confluence capturing everything from specifications to ski trip plans. Having this knowledge captured in one searchable place has been invaluable for bringing new employees up to speed and sharing knowledge through the company.

To this point, most of the pages have written by the more technical people in the companyl; I’m hoping that the WYSIWYG editing will make everyone in the company a content author.