An update for Zoho Wiki has been scheduled from 9:30 am GMT to 10:30 am GMT, July 15, 2007. Zoho Wiki service will not be available during this period. We regret for the inconvenience caused.

Featuring a few Zoho Wikis we came across here.

The Montana Library Association recently conducted their annual conference and here is their Wiki. Uri Levanon of Craze Digital is organizing a music event, muse.net on June 29 in Israel and he has a wiki named MuseNet. Note how beautifully crafted the instructions are in both Hebrew & English, given the fact that Hebrew is written from Right-to-Left! And we find a lot many Wikis being created in many international languages as well - Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, German etc.

Here’s a Wiki for past, present and future Entrepreneurs, the Purdue Entrepreneurship Certificate Program Wiki. And yours truly maintains a few Wiki pages as well the Zoho Wiki FAQ page and a collection of poems.

Zoho Wiki is free. You can use your existing Zoho ID for logging in or sign-up now. If you are already using Zoho Wiki, do tell us how you are using it.

With the latest Zoho Wiki update, you can add tags to each of your Wiki pages. With tags, you can easily group like pages together and it helps during search too - all pages of a particular tag are listed when a tag is clicked upon.

Zoho Wiki’s sharing feature was facing this issue of the sharing mail not being delivered sometimes, thanks to mail service provider filters wrongly classifying it as spam. Now the link that is being sent is visible to the Wiki Administrator (the owner of the Wiki who sends the sharing mail). If you are the Wiki’s owner & think the mail has not reached the intended recipient(s), you can now copy-paste the link and send it as a separate mail.

Another pretty useful addition is of the URLs in your page text getting auto-linked once you ‘Save’ the page. Your Wiki page name titles if present in the page text will auto-link to the appropriate page as well and mail IDs become clickable too (opens your mail client when clicked).

As informed earlier, Zoho Wiki’s latest update added the site map and an easier way for moving around pages. Your Wiki pages can now be re-associated as a sub-page of another through easy drag-and-drop. A sub-page can even be made as a parent page to another. And you can now set privelege options for comments in your Wiki (previously only public wiki pages can be commented upon by others).

Go ahead, check out Zoho Wiki and test drive the new features.

Since the release of Zoho Wiki Beta, we have made available some oft-asked-for features by our users. Listing them below :

• You can rename your Wiki page title
• Delete option for the wikis you created
• Optional ‘Table of Contents’ for a Wiki page (Headings in the page will be made part of the TOC and linked when you choose that option)
• Performance improvements for faster loading of the wiki pages

Other than the above, we have fixed a few bugs too. Coming up next are improvements to the current navigational system. Till we get that in place, please use the ‘Wiki Index’ at the bottom of your Wiki page for listing all the pages in your Wiki.

Do tell us if you have would like to have anything specific in Zoho Wiki.

Zoho Wiki offers quite a few options for access control. For example, you can have a select group of members edit the Wiki but make the Wiki viewable for public. Or, say you can have the editing of the wiki as private (only you can edit it) but make the Wiki viewable by a select group of people or the public.
A query we receive from many Zoho Wiki users is how to have such permissions set, particularly group permissions. The following are the general steps involved in setting the permission levels for a group Wiki.

1. Login to the Wiki you created
2. Click on the ‘Settings’ link at the top. In the pop-up that appears, under the heading ‘Change your wiki permissions’, you will have to choose ‘Group(s)’ in atleast one of the headings - Reading/Editing.
3. Once done, you should be seeing a ‘Group Members’ link at the top of your Wiki’s Dashboard page. If you aren’t seeing it, try refreshing your browser.
4. Click on the ‘Group Members’ link and in the pop-up that appears, click on the ‘Add New Members’ link
5. Add email IDs of your friends/group members and click on the ‘Add’ button
6. The email IDs should get added with the message as ‘Pending’
7. All the members that you added would have been sent a mail saying you have added them up as a group member in your wiki.
8. If they have an account with Zoho Wiki already (in the same email ID that you used), they can login and see your wiki under ‘My Subscribed Wikis’ at the right-bottom and they can ’subscribe’ to it
9. Else they should sign up for a new account at http://wiki.zoho.com (with the same email ID that you used to mail them) and then can become a group member of your wiki as in the step above

Do tell us how useful you found the above tip to be.

Some news from this part of the world - Zoho’s home city, Chennai, India. Wikicamp.in, an event to better understand the role that Wikis play in today’s world is to be held this Sunday, February 25, 2007. The participants list has very different profiles of people and shows that Indian enterprises are indeed interested in this new platform.

Zoho is one of the sponsors of the event. See you there

Wikis have typically been associated with geeks, web-savvy folks as there can be a learning curve to learn the Wiki syntax. With Zoho Wiki, we plan to eliminate this need by having a WYSIWYG editor and making it a Wiki for all. But doing this, users who have been exposed to Wiki syntax may feel the pinch like the below query from a user points out :

I have noticed that I can make an auto link to another page if the page is called something like ‘ThisPage’ (The traditional CamelCase Wiki syntax). But I can only reference a page named ‘ThisPage’ and for ‘This-Page’, it will not work. May be I can write it as [[This-Page]] and the Wiki will know then you want that to be an auto link.

It is the classic case of wanting to serve everyone We hope to overcome this, may be by providing the original Wiki syntax as an option as well.

Coming to the user’s query, we have the ‘Insert Web Link’ icon and there are options to link text in different ways : to other Wiki pages, external web pages and as a ‘mail to’ link. Choose the text to be linked and click on the ‘Insert Web Link’ icon (the one shown as a chain link in the second row) in the Zoho Wiki toolbar. Choose the suitable option for you there - ‘Wiki Pages’ (if you want the link to go another Wiki page), ‘URL’ (any external web page) or ‘E-mail Address’ (if you want the link to be a mailto: email ID). The image below shows how it would look like when the ‘URL’ option is chosen.

And what if there is a CamelCase word in your Wiki text which automatically shows up as a Wiki link but you want to be shown as just plain text? Simple. Choose the word/phrase and the hit the ‘No Wiki’ icon.

Hope you found the tips useful.

We had an excellent response to the Zoho Wiki release. Thanks to all who have created their Wikis and sent us your valuable feedback comments! We have collected some blog posts and news articles across the net mentioning the release. This Zoho Wiki page has all the details.

We had an update yesterday which fixed a couple of bugs. Many Zoho users have underscore as part of their user names. And when this underscore got transferred to the Zoho Wiki sub-domain, it caused a few issues. We addressed this by automatically converting the underscore in the user’s name to an hyphen. So a Zoho Wiki domain like http://arvind_natarajan.wiki.zoho.com will now automatically redirect to http://arvind-natarajan.wiki.zoho.com.

We received a few feedback mails from our users saying that an error page got displayed and the Wiki they created could not be accessed. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused. Analyzing this, we found that such accounts weren’t formed fully due to a bug. For correcting this, we would like only those users who created an account but couldn’t access it and got the error page with the message “Server Error Occurred. Please try again later or please write to us at support@zohowiki.com” to delete and re-add their Zoho Wiki by following the below procedure :

1. Login to https://accounts.zoho.com.
2. You will find Zoho Wiki listed under ‘My Zoho Services’
3. Click on the ‘Remove’ link for the Zoho Wiki entry.
4. You will be asked for your password and confirmation. Once you confirm, the ‘Zoho Wiki’ entry will get moved to the ‘Try other Zoho Services’ table below.
5. Now click on the ‘Add New’ link of the Zoho Wiki entry
6. Zoho Wiki will get re-added to the ‘My Zoho Services’ table again
7. Clicking on the Zoho Wiki link will open your Wiki in a new browser tab/window and you should be able to access your Wiki now

Please do mail your feedback suggestions and queries about Zoho Wiki to feedback at zohowiki dot com.

It’s time for yet another new product announcement from Zoho. Presenting to you the Zoho Wiki. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has a great post about the release. Important features of the product include :

• All standard Wiki features
• A powerful WYSIWYG editor (Zoho Writer’s) that includes features like spell check, revision history, difference between any two versions and reverting to any older version
• Another big plus is the grouping functionality. In addition to having your Wiki as public (by default) and private, you can make your Wiki be viewed and/or edited by a selected group of members
• The Zoho Wiki uses the Zoho Single Sign-on, meaning you can use your existing Zoho ID to access it (no need for separate sign-up/in)
• Embedding of objects into your Wiki pages like a Zoho Sheet chart, a Zoho Show slide show, a Zoho Creator application/form or a YouTube video. Visit this Zoho Wiki page for more.
• Other than the Wiki associated with the user name, a user can create 2 more wikis with his Zoho account. And there is no limitation to the number of pages per Wiki too. All this for absolutely free.

A few screenshots from Zoho Wiki as an embedded slide show below :

Launch as slide show

Try the all new Zoho Wiki and do tell us your valuable feedback.