One morning last week when I came into work, I noticed that all internal links on our hosted Socialtext-based wiki had stopped working. We use the wiki as our intranet in organisation, which, despite being small is spread over several locations. Our wiki is critical to our daily operation, so I immediately contacted support and almost one week later, the issue finally seems to be resolved.
This type of issue could probably happen with any type of software, but this is unfortunately only one in a long list of problems we’ve experienced ourselves or heard about via other Socialtext customers. I commented on quite a few upgrade problems with Socialtext on the CMS Watch blog back in August 2008. Since then, Socialtext has carried out several upgrades. Not all have gone smoothly. One of them which was announced after the upgrade had taken place. It was announced via e-mail to all our wiki users, including members of our community of practice, many of whom were surprised to suddenly hear directly from Socialtext.
We’ve recently contributed to the wiki chapters in the updated The Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration Report by CMS Watch. Here you’ll find a detailed evaluation of Socialtext and several other wiki vendors. Back in 2008, we also published research on Wikis in the Enterprise. As always it has been very rewarding to interview customers and partners and hear their experiences with an emerging technology. My colleague Dorthe Jespersen recently identified several wiki myths. She did this mainly through talking to users.
Socialtext is an interesting company, in that it is trying to be much more than a wiki vendor, but the basics still seem to cause problems. I have not heard of any problems with downtime, but the issues reported have been painful enough for the customers. Are the many issues reported with Socialtext a quintessential example of software as a service, or is it just isolated problems with a single vendor? What’s your take?
UPDATE Feb 11: What seemed to be fixed yesterday, remains an issue. Internal links are still broken on our wiki-based intranet 
Update Feb 12: The problem is now located to be related to our custom skin and IE8 RC1. We’ll use Firefox until IE8 is certified for Socialtext….
Matt Wiseley February 11th, 2009 19:45
As somebody who runs a hosted wiki product, I would say that problems should not be accepted simply because of the deployment model. I’m sure ST had good reasons for these goofs, but it’s important to keep SaaS vendors as accountable to quality as traditional software vendors. I’d argue that SaaS products have much more control over qualty, given that they can almost instantly fix a problem rather than wait for customers to install updates locally.
Ross Mayfield February 12th, 2009 19:45
Hi Janus — I guess the point of your blog post was indeed that the software was serviced. Instead of your resources tracking down that a user was using a pre-release browser (Microsoft IE8 RC1) that did the damage, our resources did, and brought it to resolution.
For your reference, your users can still use IE and Safari, not just Firefox
http://www.socialtext.net/exchange/index.cgi?which_browsers_do_we_support
Happy to satisfy your exceptional concerns,
Ross
Peter Erik Bang Nissen February 12th, 2009 19:45
Ross is Chairman, President and Co-founder of Socialtext. I’m a colleague of Janus and have also been affected by the bumpy ride that we have had with Socialtext.
Indeed, the software was serviced – but there are number of other connotations to the term “service” that SaaS providers should pay particular (more) attention to:
- Timely communication before updates, also of the changes that they may imply, rather than after the fact or not at all.
- Responsiveness and proactive follow-up when customers report problems introduced by updates. This is particularly important if testing is not thorough enough and should really be an area where SaaS providers have the upper hand as they can move much faster in their implementation of post-update bug fixes (see Matt’s point above).
These elements should be basics to a SaaS provider – however, “..the basics still seem to cause problems” for Socialtext as Janus put it.
I was baffled by your comment on our exceptional concerns. Not so much because of the IE8 issue, as I do realise that the issue of when to ensure compatibility with new browser versions will be a difficult decision to any vendor of browser-based software. More so because we experienced a previous issue (caused by a change made by SocialText) which was also considered an exceptional concern.
In short the change resulted in a lot of special characters being displayed as garbage code (see http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1344-Socialtext,-SaaS,-and-upgrading-enterprise-wikis). It hit us particularly badly because of three local characters in the Danish language – but it also affected characters like ” and -, which are used in English, too, and letters with accents which are found in many languages including Spanish, French, German, the other Scandinavian languages, Turkish and more.
This bug was nonetheless treated as an exceptional concern – it was introduced in July and after a long struggle, it was custom fixed page-by-page for us in December 2008. The task of identifying which pages were affected was ours as a customer.
In addition to illustrating my points above about SaaS providers and service, this also means that as a non-native English speaking buyer, you need to be very cautious if you decide to purchase a product from a vendor that focuses on the English-speaking market – your language-related issues will be last in the queue if most other buyers are from native English speaking countries.
Do not buy web software from Anglo-American companies? Peculiar recommendation, yet not altogether illegitimate in some cases…
Ross Mayfield February 12th, 2009 19:45
Please don’t misconstrue my comment. By exceptional, I meant bug, an exception to product or process. And what is important about exceptions is what you learn from them. SaaS is a commitment to continuous improvement with the ability to change faster.
J. Boye » Blog Archive » New browsers come with new issues February 12th, 2009 19:45
[...] Interfaces simply stop working, such as illustrated in our comment earlier this week about our problems with Socialtext. Last week, I also pointed to an issue with IE8 and Google Analytics. If you are a regular CMS [...]