With their tagline of “work doesn’t have to suck” how can you not want to like OpenTeams? This new entrant in the Ajax application space has taken an idea that will already be familiar to most web workers – the now-venerable wiki – and reinvented with a more structured, drag-and-drop user interface. The concept actually works quite well, and although some of their advertising copy is a bit over the top (“fewer bureaucracy zombies”), I can think of several organizations I’ve been involved with where OpenTeams would have worked quite well.
The traditional wiki makes good sense to the sort of person who is at home with the command line, but I’ve heard the same objections over and over again from people whose main job does not revolve around technology:
- You want me to edit this markup soup?
- How do I tell what’s new?
- How can I find anything in this mess?
OpenTeams addresses these objections by wrapping a GUI around the wiki. Individual wiki pages are still there, but they’re pushed into the right-hand pane of a three-pane user interface, and edited through a rich text interface instead of via a markup language. This pane also lets you group these pages (called cPages in OpenTeams) into two higher-level constructs: a Briefing Outline (sort of like a set of notes for a presentation), or an Initiative (a project, which can contain cPages and Briefing Outlines, as well as text of its own). All of these things can have their own discussion, tags, and attached files, and there’s a tab which shows the history as well.

The center pane of the user interface is a list viewer which serves as a drag source. Want to add a new cPage to a Briefing Outline? Drag it from the center pane, drop it in the Briefing Outline, done. This replaces the name-based linking scheme of the traditional wiki. The list viewer also has a “What’s New” tab which lets you easily monitor changes that the rest of your team has been making. Off to the left is the third pane, which is used for overall navigation, displaying a treeview of your workspaces, and showing users and tags.
OpenTeams offers $42 in free access to get you started, after which it is 99 cents per user-login-day. If you stop paying, you don’t lose access to your content, you just lose the ability to edit it. For distributed teams that include non-programmers working on projects with a lot of moving parts it looks worth a serious evaluation.
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