Wikis
We are about 120 people in our company, and we wanted to see what happened if we installed a Wiki ‘on the wild’. So, we installed OpenWiki about 45 days ago. Our idea was not to solve a specific problem, but just to check if a Wiki could help us to improve the way we work.
We just sent an email to everyone saying ‘There is a Wiki in this url’.
After a slow start (most people didn’t know what a Wiki was), people started to use it. It has 583 pages and 3600 revisions right now.
People are using it for quite different purposes:
- A way to share links to resources in the internet. It’s like a company-wide favorites folder, with links that are (or should be) important to most of the people.
- A way to track some kind of bugs (showing some weakness in our bug tracking software)
- We had internal ‘Olympic Games’ in the company, and the Wiki was a great way to share information about it, like scores, schedules, etc.
- A better ‘Outlook notes’. If you want to write down some thoughts, the Wiki is a great place to do it. You will always find them, and other people can be enlightened by them ;)
- An informal way to document features, which helps building the product documentation. These pages should probably be removed after the real documentation is done.
- A way to keep ‘Wish Lists’ and ‘Feature Lists’, also showing some weakness in our internal software.
- A way to discuss the implementation of new features.
- Other ways that I cannot categorize ;)
A Wiki is good for some of these things and bad for others. When you realize it’s not good for something, you know you should get (or build) a better tool for that particular case.
We chose OpenWiki because :
- It is very easy to setup (it’s an ASP application).
- It supports SQL Server so we can easily access the data with DeKlarit.
- It has a good diff engine, so you can see the previous version of a document and see who made which changes.
- It has an RSS feed for the pages, so I can keep up to date with it from NewzCrawler
- It’s an RSS aggregator, so you can build a wiki page with a group of related feeds.
So, give it a try, you have nothing to lose...