I certainly wish the founder well, but I think there's a pretty low ceiling for how far you can go with something like this, because it goes against some of the biggest reasons organizations adopt Office 365 in the first place:
1. You're stuck with another subscription for a "one use" product. Even though MS products often suck, you get a lot of functionality for one reasonable price. You might argue "$3.50 per month is nothing". Well, you're not going to be using a wiki and only have one person able to make changes. Otherwise you'd create a page some other way. You're going to have to pay on a per-person basis for a wiki that they might edit only a couple times over the course of the month.
Carry that out to five years, and the math doesn't work.
2. You have to give your data to a company you don't know and storing it in an alternative location.
3. You're dealing with a second, small company you've never heard of.
Point 2 is addressed in FAQ in a way that raises considerably more concern:
Q: I am a corporate user, so I do not know if my IT or compliance departments would allow me to add Perfect Wiki
A: We can help you with this! Perfect Wiki is the only one wiki for Teams with full-text search and export capabilities. It's hosted on Google Cloud platform and encrypts all the stored data, furthermore, we have applied for a government certification.
Whereas Microsoft use regionally controlled storage for 365. I think the op is right, just another headache for IT. Sure I actually wasn't a better wiki, but not enough for another subscription.
And Outline already has Slack-integration. So someone ported the Slack integration to Teams and is selling it as a new product? Clever, if a bit provocative. I wonder if there'll still be a market for it once Outline gains Teams support as well.
1) I don't know which one is newer, outline.com is just the one that I know, never heard about the other one.
2) That's right! Nevertheless we have a problem where there are either 2...n software solutions with the same name (like here) or where the names are so fictional that you'd never guess what the software is about when hearing the name.
My point was: Let's find better ways to name our app/software, so that it's clearer which one we are talking about.
Trademark. There are a great many that are generic words. Fortunately they are limited to the markets the owner is participating in and the consumer confusion test relieves trademark squatting somewhat.
This isn't a wiki. The core defining characteristics of a wiki are:
Editing, Navigation, Linking, and Searching.
Wikis do not have any enforced navigation structure. Navigation is implicit (defined by Editing and Linking).
OneNote, "PerfectWiki", Teams built in "wiki", and many many others rely on a hierarchical page structure to function.
This would be fine were it an optional navigation mechanism, but it rarely is. Usually this is also how content is stored and managed. This ultimately makes the content itself VERY brittle to change, very difficult to refactor, and rarely navigable for long term use.
It's a much more approachable UI paradigm for beginners, but I have yet to see a large knowledgebase that didn't collapse under its own weight over time when using an enforced tree-structure to content.
It's incredibly rare that knowledge fits into a hierarchical taxonomy. Doing so at a UI level creates conflict and cognitive dissonance that accrues over time.
And when I say "reminds me a lot" I mean: hmm, the exact same font, menu, icons, emoiji's, buttons, color scheme.. to the point where I can't find a single difference.
> Also, I see this is your first comment on HN, welcome!
Insinuations of astroturfing without evidence are explicitly against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Overwhelmingly (and I mean well over 99.9% of the time) people make guesses that are completely wrong, and it poisons discussion.
I certainly didn't read anything negative from someone welcoming a new poster to HN. Dang, I think you might be jumping the gun a bit here, and even going against HN guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Of course the sentence is harmless in itself. But given that the commenter was repeatedly expressing skepticism about the bona fides of the project (perhaps accurately—that's a separate issue), my guess is that it was meant that way, and if so, that's against the rules.
Moderation is guesswork. Inevitably we guess wrong sometimes, and in such cases are happy to apologize and fix the mistakes. But not making any such guesses isn't an option, since then people could get away with anything as long as they phrased it ambiguously.
As others have said, good luck with this, but some keep points.
1) If you want feature rich thick document storage like this, there is already the ability to use onenote for these purposes.
2) I don't think you'll find that many companies that have gone through the effort to integrate all their services into office 365 would be happy about having to pump all of this into a 3rd parties google cloud instance.
3) There are a large number of all in one 3rd party backup systems for office 365 that backup everything, this would be outside that, and the backup options are exporting to html/pdf?
I'm just wondering if this could have been backed by azure/sharepoint/onedrive which would keep the data stored where most people would feel more comfortable. But I suppose if it did, it would be hard to justify as a SAAS that way.
> 3) There are a large number of all in one 3rd party backup systems for office 365 that backup everything, this would be outside that, and the backup options are exporting to html/pdf?
I'm going through this one at the moment. "Everything" has a billion caveats with every vendor, depending on the APIs that are made available by MS. Teams for example has a lot of holes even before you introduce third party apps. Then on top of that you can't 1:1 restore a lot of stuff.
I'm not certain you can rely on the non-SharePoint document based parts of 365. It seems like a fat finger away from destroying a lot of knowledge.
Congratulations on the Teams integration and launch. The in-built wiki in Teams is sorely lacking some basic wiki features like permissions, search, and copy/paste. You nailed all those pain points.
Nice looking product. I’ll give it a spin later today. Congrats!
—
One note on your pricing, my sense is that you aren’t charging enough.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you owe it to your customer to charge enough for you to stay in business. 100 users for 50/m makes me nervous for you.
I work for enterprise using Teams and that doesn't change the fact that it would be faster to send a pigeon with a printed sheet of paper than edit anything through Teams.
I think what the parent comment was trying to imply was that some of us work for enterprise...and some of those enterprises push us to work in a manner that supports - not an ideal workflow, but rather - the procurement department's contracts with suppliers such as Microsoft...so we're forced to use specific platforms because of contracting not because it is the best tool for the job. I applaud you for seemingly working for an org that allows you the freedom to use your choice of tools! ;-)
Is that on a Mac? Most people who have complaints with slowness appear to be Mac users in my opinion. The Windows version runs fine on my end even on 6 year old PCs.
where are you, how are you connecting,what OS are you using?
There are issues with teams don't get me wrong, but I've yet to experience working with/through teams pose any significant slow downs, and it seems nearly all things that are embedded in teams can be shelled out to default system browser anyway, the native wiki being one of the big exceptions.
Edit: sorry that was not polite ... You put real work into a project and deserve some proper feedback not a single sentence that was mostly about me. Give me a moment and I will try some real feedback.
Ok - Some notes.
1. Blogs are a very good source of evergreen SEO especially if you focus on the keywords that work for you. So please make sure you do weekly or more posts on a blog that only has one every 1.5 months so far. I suggest you Make a commitment to yourself to do say 1 a week for the next year. Blogs that look given up are as negative an indicator as a git repo with last updates in 2016.
(cf Rand Fishkin - there was a really good microconf episode on this. His new startup might help you find likely wiki owners, it i suggest just listening for the mindset !)
2. English is not your first language - this can be a hinderance or an advantage. You can probably find someone to brush up the text - but I suggest that you aim for also having a look at near-English markets - India being an interesting example - a Hindi landing page might make an interesting SEO tactic, yet still allow you to expect many readers can bounce into the English blog.
3. I honestly don't know your product market fit. Till now Teams always seemed a bit also ran, but they do seem to have real growth- and if you have some paying customers happy to put blurb on your site you are doing something right :-)
Good question! A lot of our users like how easy it's to start using PerfectWiki compared to OneNote. Secondly, we have much better integration to Ms Teams. Lastly, we have ability to lock content from editing and powerful full-text search.
Many of our new users surprisingly migrate to PerfectWiki even form Confluence :)
Not sure about the content locking, but OneNote is super easy to use, can be embedded into teams tabs or files, and has full text search. What’s better about this than embedding OneNote?
Thank you for these points. I also noticed export to Markdown. Exporting to usable formats is definitely a sore point for OneNote, especially the web version.
Should be more than a concern for you as it is an inevitability. Microsoft has been steadily improving Teams and investing lots of resources to the platform. The Teams wiki will be improved as well. I wouldn't even try to compete with them in this space.
It's also free and built-in. Also, it isn't quite true that this functionality is missing as it is provided by the full Office 365 offering (Office 365 has a fully featured wiki).
Teams wiki is simple, because it's tied to channels that are frequently transient. Regardless, I wouldn't bank on any long-term advantage from having these features. MS could drop a Teams update tomorrow and render your entire business case moot (either by adding those missing features, or changing the API in some detrimental, to you, way, or making their offering better than yours).
I hope you do well, but .. you're directly competing with a core functionality (provided for free) in Teams. And that's a tough spot to be in, short-term and long-term. If you want to make a business from it, I would explore ways to pivot.
I've actually used the wiki built into Teams, and honestly, it's crap.
I used only the web version, and it was an extremely frustrating experience. Copy and paste seldom works as expected, with text in the page/section often permanently ending up an odd size/font. Once you have more than about 10 words in a page, performance crawls practicality to a standstill, and there are multi-second pauses very frequently. Every so often it would randomly reload the page, losing anything you'd typed recently. Also, images you insert will randomly disappear at a later date. Literally cannot understand how they could release something so fatally broken.
And it doesn't support markdown, which is a total no-go for me[0]
[0] it converts "#" to level 1 and level 2 titles, but that's it. And even that only works as expected half the time
1. You're stuck with another subscription for a "one use" product. Even though MS products often suck, you get a lot of functionality for one reasonable price. You might argue "$3.50 per month is nothing". Well, you're not going to be using a wiki and only have one person able to make changes. Otherwise you'd create a page some other way. You're going to have to pay on a per-person basis for a wiki that they might edit only a couple times over the course of the month. Carry that out to five years, and the math doesn't work.
2. You have to give your data to a company you don't know and storing it in an alternative location.
3. You're dealing with a second, small company you've never heard of.