Introducing the ultimate Wiki editor...Word

I just released a beta of my product that allows you to use Microsoft Word as a WYSIWYG wiki editor for Confluence. It's called Word/DAV. Go check it out here http://www.benryan.com/.

Personally, I enjoy writing wiki text. It's very much the progammer in me. There is a satisfaction to writing in plain text and then seeing it transformed into something else. 5 years ago, I was working on a technical document management system for NASA. I saw first hand a lot of the pain points of enterprise collaboration. The biggest roadblock I saw to enabling better online collaboration was that most documents were a black box. You couldn't get the content in and out of them without the host application. This made it impossible to do a lot of interesting things that people wanted automated.

• Diffing and merging rich content.
• Building a document from multiple smaller documents
• Email Notifications that include the actual content that changed
• Approve/Reject changes in their browser

Around this time I discovered wikis and fell in love. I saw the potential for wikis to be a format-neutral way to store information and to do these types of things. Confluence is by far the best wiki out there and it does some of the above things...but not as well as it could.

I would like to see wikis replace traditional document management systems in the enterprise. Word/DAV is my first step towards that goal. It creates a bridge between the old way of doing things and the new. I hope someone out there finds it useful :-)