[australia] Wikis in organisations

[Brendan Quinn]

Hi folks, thought I'd chip in here...

At the BBC we use Confluence, built by a good Aussie company, Atlassian.
We basically had to introduce a "corporate wiki" because each project
team had its own wiki installed on a linux box under someone's desk, and
over time people started putting business-critical information on them.
We needed a solution to aggregate all the wikis and provide proper
availability, backups, support etc.

Confluence lets you make your own "Spaces", which are basically
independent wikis that anyone can create -- a great bonus as before you
had to be/ask a developer to do the right config files, run the DB
creation scripts etc each time you wanted to create a new wiki in
MoinMoin, UseMod etc.

It also provides a rich-text editor which all the businessy folk use,
while us hard-core-markup types use the wiki markup mode which is more
powerful. You can also sign up to an RSS feed showing updates to your
favourite spaces, etc. It's quite cool.

Based on that, we now have hundreds of "spaces" with gigabytes of data
(admittedly including lots of attachments). Pretty much every project of
note has its own wiki, and it is one of the first places people go for
information. Hardly anyone uses our intranet now (an Immediacy install
with only a few dozen "ambassador users" who have the client software
installed), there are thousands of active users of the wiki. It's widely
seen as an essential tool, and the people who run it are scrambling to
make sure it can scale to meet our future needs!

Maintaining the freshness of the repositories (aka "wiki gardening") is
definitely an issue, especially because so many people search the wiki
to find information and expect it to be up to date. Generally it is up
to project leads and team assistants to make sure thngs are up to date
and to hassle people to maintain their pages, 

At least each page has a last-updated datestamp prominently displayed.

Migrating all the old wikis to Confluence was an issue as well, if
anyone wants some Ruby scripts to migrate MoinMoin and UseMod to
Confluence, just ask... For some projects they took the opportunity to
get rid of a lot of crud that had accumulated over the past two or three
years. It will be interesting to see how our wiki installs are faring in
another 2-3 years time... That will present a whole new set of content
management issues :-)

Brendan.

-----Original Message-----
From: australia-bounces at lists.cmprofessionals.org
[mailto:australia-bounces at lists.cmprofessionals.org] On Behalf Of White,
David
Sent: 12 October 2006 01:56
To: australia at lists.cmprofessionals.org
Subject: [australia] Wikis in organisations

I'd like to second Brad's request for info on how people are using
wikis.

They seem to be a potentially useful tool for the development of
knowledge and perhaps content within an organisation. 

Is anyone here using a wiki within a business unit or whole of
organisation? What are the important standards and online/offline
processes required to make the wiki work well? (alliteration intentional
:)

Thanks,
David
--
David White
Senior ECM Specialist, ICT Portfolio Delivery, RailCorp
e: david.white at railcorp.nsw.gov.au
p: (02) 820 22280






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