Portals and KM

eXo Provides Cloud Workspaces to Enable Flexible Social Intranets

I have covered eXo before (see Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo CEO, Looks at the Social Enterprise). Recently, I had a chance to speak with Benjamin again about their latest offering. He said that the goal with eXo Cloud Workspaces is to provide an easy-to-use social intranet so work teams can start to collaborate in a fully functional space.  He feels that there is a gap between simple activity stream-based tools and the full-function enterprise collaboration platforms, including their own eXo Platform 3.5. So they are now offering eXo Cloud Workspaces to fill this gap. Here is a sample home page screen.

eXo Cloud Workspaces offers out-of-the-box social intranet features for small teams that can be scalable to meet the IT needs of the enterprise. For the last eight years, eXo has been selling its comprehensive on-premise collaboration platform to large organizations. eXo Platform 3.0 added social intranet features to that collaboration platform, then eXo Platform 3.5 added low-level features that enable the delivery of hosted services, such as Cloud Workspaces. eXo can now meet the needs of large enterprises, as well as the needs of smaller firms that want a low-cost, on-demand social intranet and collaboration service. For small firms that eventually need more capability and want to go inside the enterprise, they can easily migrate from Cloud Workspaces to eXo Platform 3.5 on-premise or in a private cloud. Here you can see a sample screen from the enterprise wiki as mentioned below.

eXo Cloud Workspaces (Beta) is a fully-functional, cloud-based service hosted by eXo. It offers a full range of social intranet and enterprise portal features, including:

• Content Management System features, including the ability to store, share, version and organize documents.
• Built-in collaboration tools, including an enterprise-grade wiki, discussion forum, and shared calendar components.
• Social network components, including the ability to create/follow activity streams, create work groups, and more.
• Embedded integrated development environment (IDE), enabling the ability to develop, customize and extend the social intranet capabilities on the fly (and with one-click ease-of-deployment).
• Secure mobile access to documents, activities and apps from iOS and Android-based devices. Below are some sample mobile screens.

Here also is a sample of the shared calendar feature.

It comes with REST APIs for two-way integration with enterprise apps. This is a critical feature as I have often written about (see Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). There is also an online development tool – eXo Cloud IDE that allows developers to create apps in the cloud without having to go through traditional IT channels and backlogs. The integration can be extended beyond simple connections to create mashups with tools like Salesforce.com. For even more complex integrations, Cloud Workspaces-based sites can be easily migrated from the eXo cloud to a deployment of eXo Platform 3.5 on premises or in a private cloud setting. Here is a sample IDE screen.

eXo Cloud Workspaces will be initially offered as a free application. You can sign up at their site (www.cloud-workspaces.com/). This free application will also remain available. At some point, a paid premium version will also become available with more storage and other capabilities. I like what they are doing and will be exploring Cloud Workspaces further.

 

 

 

 

Social Software Gaining Greater Traction with the Enterprise and Vendors Respond

Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz writes that 2010 will be a defining year for enterprise 2.0 in his report, Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview. He goes on the writes that “a very broad and rich landscape of technology vendors will differentiate to stay relevant in this crowded market. With enterprise social technologies, buyers must now assess vendors pursuing three distinct strategies: commoditization, horizontal and vertical solutions, and integration with adjacent technologies.” I would add that vendors are creating very feature rich tools as the many of the more pure play offerings are now adding such additions as micro-blogging within their suite.

I was especially interested in his data on social media adoption through a survey of US and European KM decision makers. Rob found that in 2010 nearly one-third of enterprises will officially support internal and or external social networking.  In addition, wiki adoption will approach 50% in 2010 and they are the most popular tool. He found that the wikipedia model can enable a broad community to generate and maintain content. Another popular use case for wikis is as “a lightweight workspace and project management tool where teams can author content or coordinate activities and tasks with confidence that the information is up to date.”

The use cases for collaborative platforms were interesting. Collaboration on content (such as office documents was the top instance at 51%. Next was using a collaboration platform as a network fileshare at 48%. Then 39% of the respondents said they were integrating our collaboration platform’s calendaring, scheduling, and task management features with their email messaging system and 28% said they were using a collaboration platform’s Web 2.0 features such as blogs, Wikis, and RSS feeds, Finally 28% said they are using a collaboration platform to facilitate sharing of documents and other content with their external partners and customer and 20% are not using a collaborative platform.  

The report goes on to document how the vendors are responding to these trends. IBM Lotus and Microsoft attempting to extend their dominant positions in collaboration and messaging to social software. The many other venders are vendors pursuing “three distinct strategies: commoditization, horizontal and vertical solutions, and integration with adjacent technologies.” I have reviewed many of the venders sited include a number I have reviewed here and on the AppGap blog such as Atlassian, Box, Central Desktop, CubeTree, EMC, Jive, MindTouch, NewsGator, Novell, OpenText, PB Works, Socialtext, and Telligent.  The report can be found on the Forrester web site. 

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

I conducted a series on interviews over the past two months on how Océ Is implementing enterprise 2.0. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Most interviews were with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ. I spoke about their SharePoint efforts with Jan van Veen, Manager Internal Communications, in Corporate Communications and Tom Dombret, the technical team lead on the SharePoint effort. I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking experiences. This post provides a summary of some key points and links to each of the five posts.

Samuel’s responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured information in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured information in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

I really like this dual architectural role for both structured and unstructured information. It makes so much sense to have these two information sources under the same architectural leadership. The approach is to define information architecture principles and then convey these principles to management and employees so they will see the logic behind the approach. This is move away from rigid top-down rules. The implementation details will change faster than the principles and managers and employees will be able to make intelligent decisions aligned with the principles.

This granting mangers and employees the right to make decisions is reflected in all of their enterprise 2.0 work and is consistent with the principles of enterprise 2.0. Samuel also provides guidance on the capabilities of each medium so users can make intelligent decisions. I think their effortts serve as a good model for others.

Creating Information Architecture at Océ in the Age of Enterprise 2.0

Lessons Learned from Implementing Social Bookmarking at Océ

Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ

Lessons Learned from the Océ SharePoint Implementation

Implementing Wikis in the Age of Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

Implementing Wikis in the Age of Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

Here is another in a series of interviews with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences. In this post I will cover their experiences with wikis and lessons learned. Earlier, I wrote out their micro-messaging experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Samuel is located in the Netherlands and his responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured information in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured information in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

As I mentioned before, I really like this dual role. It makes so much sense to have these two information sources under the same architectural leadership. Usually knowledge management and IT data management are siloed, limiting the effectiveness of both. This is the first time I have seen this and I commend the vision of Océ. This excellent concept will be covered in my next blog post on Océ but the story today is about their wiki experiences.

Samuel said that part of his role is looking for opportunities for taking Web 2.0 social media inside the organization. He also supports efforts started by others. In the case of wikis, a software engineering manager began the first effort. This manager wanted to create an internal version of the Wikipedia to share best practices and refine processes in their R&D group. He wanted a method to collect, make accessible, and keep current their R&D practices.

This effort was a big success. Lots of people in the R&D group use it, if only to read the content. Samuel said this application is a great way to introduce wikis into an enterprise. He said that the use of a wiki with open editing privileges assumes that everyone in the enterprise is smart and can make intelligent contributions to the firm. Working together people can refine and improve processes in a bottom up way that creates a greater sense of engagement. This all happens at Océ.

People assumed responsibility for their areas of expertise. They often followed updates to their entries. When there was change by someone else, it usually started a conversation over best practices. Sometimes management was brought into these conversations to get support and offer guidance. Any differences have been resolved without edit wars. Some people put in original content and others are good at cleaning up the format and language of contributions by others.

Samuel said that the open platform of the wiki has trigged a sense of empowerment by employees. He also said that it works better as resource for this purposes as you can see content immediately and do not have to open documents that may or may not be what you need.

At the same time, Samuel said that wikis are not the solution to everything. They have not been as useful for file sharing but that may, in part, be a limitation of the tool they are using. Samuel said that since they have other tools for activities such as file sharing and blogging, this makes the wiki better as it is only used for what it does best. He feels it is not a good practice to stretch wikis to tasks they are not designed for.

There are three types of wikis at Océ now. The first one was the R&D wiki just described. More recently, a corporate wiki has been established to provide wiki functionality across the enterprise. It has four main sections: expertise wikis, department wikis, product wikis and project wikis. The expertise wiki includes a subsection that indexes abbreviations used in the firm. This index was the responsibility of one person who felt it was better to crowd source the task through the wiki. It has been successful and is a good example of an ideal task for a wiki.

The product and project wikis were moved out the R&D wikis to provide greater access. One project wiki is used to collect materials for learning purposes and for exploring how a wiki can be used for this goal.

The third type of wiki at Océ is used to share information outside the enterprise. For example, Samuel set up a section here to share information within the Dutch knowledge management group. It contains people from large Dutch-based international organizations such as Shell, Heineken, and Unilever. They set up meeting agendas and share presentations in this wiki.

In the future, Samuel wants to explore ways to use semantic analysis to get a richer understanding of the wiki content. The content is all now within one wiki platform. At first, there had been separate wikis. When these wikis were integrated they discovered a number of teams working on similar efforts that were not fully aware of this. These teams were able to share useful information and learn from each other. Samuel would like to be able to explore relationships between content on an ongoing basis for similar results.

Samuel is also continuing to explore the relationship between wikis and other more formal tools in the enterprise. He wants to maintain a balanced approach where each tool is only used for the tasks is best designed for. At the same time, he would like the tools to better integrate and share content. For example, wikis are often used for collaborative editing of a document. Then the final version is placed into a more formal tool.

Océ has a traditional corporate intranet and Samuel is on the steering committee. The committee agreed that about 80-90% of the content of their intranet should be on the wiki or other platforms than the intranet. He feels it is process information and should easily be changed by the crowd. Samuel has suggested that they make a list of these pages and migrate them to the wiki or other platforms. At the same time he does not want to limit migration to the wiki. Samuel wants to tell intranet authors especially, and employees in general, what the options are for information sharing as he explained in this blog post, Where Do I Share and Store My Information? He wants to tell authors about wiki's, blogs, file sharing, etc. Then they can start to think about options and choose the best place for their information.

Samuel has also proposed an innovation wiki, together with a colleague. This proposal is still waiting for formal approval, but seems likely to be approved. Many managers support it and want to give it a try. He is waiting for formal approval, but could set this up in a minute. Because of the Océ culture Samuel wants formal approval first and commitment from the R&D board. He wants them to commit to actually pick up the good ideas that will be generated on the wiki, provide resources, so the ideas can realized.

Wikis have been successful at Océ because they were implemented in a thoughtful way that aligned with business needs, company culture, and the capabilities within wikis. They are not seen as a be-all cure but one more tool with specific capabilities that is added to the total mix of tools.

Prescient Digital Media Study Finds Social Media Becoming More Mainstream on Corporate Intranet

Toby Ward recently sent me a copy of the Intranet Global Survey that I participated in. Toby is the CEO of Prescient Digital Media. The headlight quote was encouraging, “Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.” The study included input from 561 organizations of all sizes from across the globe and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

The breakdown of specific types of social media on intranets include: 47% have wikis (10% have no plans or interest), 45% have blogs (11% have no plans or interest, 46% have discussion forums (9% have no plans or interest), 37% have RSS (12% have no plans or interest), 23% have podcasts (30% have no plans or interest), and 19% have social networking (20% with no plans or interest. I am not sure which is better the high numbers who have already adopted or the low numbers with no plans or interests. The study concluded that an organization without Intranet 2.0 tools, or plans to use them, risks being out-flanked by their competition.

Many of these initiatives have been accomplished on low budgets, 46% have spent $10,000 or less, 35% have spent between $10,000 and $100,00; and 19% have spent $100,000 or more. However, remember these numbers come from organizations of all sizes. The sample found that 61% have more than 1,000 employees; 32% have 6,000 or more employees; 39% have less than 1000 employees. So many of the large organizations have still managed to implement with a small financial investment to date.

Of those organizations that have not implemented Intranet 2.0 tools, lack of a business case (30%), executive support (33%), and IT support (31%) and internal policy concerns (27%) are the top barriers. The study adds that business cases do not need to always have hard ROI and other dollar-driven targets, but a clear need must be established.

The use of intranet 2.0 is relatively new as only 15% of the firm shave had them over 2 years and 355 have had them less than a year. The study concluded that few organizations have had these tools long enough to perfect their use or achieve critical-mass acceptance. At the same time, firms have spent relatively little time evaluating tools as almost half have spent than less that three months at this tasks.

The major uses cases for intranet 2.0 tool include: employee collaboration (77%), knowledge management (71%) employee engagement (53%), and executive communications (35%). This is useful information for those who see enterprise 2.0, in part, as a realization of the promise of knowledge management and as adding better collaboration to a firm’s capabilities. On the other end, cost control (14%) and cost savings (19%) are a low priority for most organizations in adopting intranet 2.0 capabilities.

Despite the common wisdom that executive involvement greatly aids adoption, the study found relatively little executive involvement as 57% of executives have never contributed content or have done so infrequently (less than once per month) and only 11% of organizations have executives that contribute content on a daily basis.

There is much more and you should look at the report. You can get a free summary or purchase all the details. I think the findings are very supportive of the concept of enterprise 2.0 as a reality and, at the same time. Show some of the things that need to be done to increased adoption.

Confluence 3.0 Released by Atlassian

Prior to the release I spoke with Bill Arconati, Confluence Product Marketing Manager. I got a good background on the evolution of Altassian as well as preview of Confluence 3.0. I was very interested, as I have known about them for some time. As a disclosure, one of my business partners, Helix Commerce, is a Canadian reseller of Confluence but I have no direct Atlassian connection.

Atlassian was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Sydney Australia. It has grown through its own direct revenue without VC help. Their first product was JIRA, a tool for issue tracking and it remains their largest seller. In 2004 their wiki product, Confluence, was released. Bill said the two tools complement each other and often led to cross-selling opportunities.

The complementary relationship of JIRA and Confluence makes sense as JIRA provides a more structured issue-tracking tool while Confluence offers the more open wiki collaboration platform. Bill gave the example of a development team that might use Confluence in the product design phase and then add JIRA in the product development stage to track issues. In both cases the product is often introduced into an enterprise through a technical team and then expands to business units as the value is seen. Many large enterprises, like Accenture or Sun, have sanctioned Confluence as their IT approved wiki standard. Customers frequently use Atlassian’s Universal Wiki Converter to migrate other wikis to Confluence.

Confluence comes in both on-premise and hosted versions. The hosted version has two levels. You can get your own server for more control over configurations and plugins. There is also a low cost shared server hosted where you have less control.

Sample use cases include intranets, team collaboration, business dashboards, knowledge management, web publishing and external communities. Atlassian is staying with the wiki concept for their promotion and branding as they believe the collaborative philosophy associated with wikis to align with their desired image for the tool.

Atlassian has recognized that a wiki interface can be a challenge to some business users so Confluence 3.0 introduces a new easier to use interface. They also added a Microsoft Office connector in version 2.9 last Summer. You can start a document in MS Word and then bring it into the wiki. You can also edit wiki pages in Word. In addition, they have made their wiki text editor more similar to Word. Their goal is to lower the barriers to content creation.

With Confluence 3.0 Atlassian is providing an enhanced plug-in environment. First, it lets users add over 80 bundled extensions or ‘macros’ including charts, image galleries and task lists to their pages in just a couple clicks through a drag and drop capability. They call this the ‘macro browser.’ In addition, Atlassian is rolling out a dedicated website (plugins.atlassian.com) that gives both plugin developers a venue to showcase their products and customers the ability to easily find, download and review over 325 plugins created by third party developers.

I asked Bill about these plugin developers. He said there is a core of about 15 firms who have developed a business around this. Others have offered plugins they developed for themselves on a free Open Source so others can improve on what they did. One developer,Peldi Guilizzoni, left his software job in the US and moved back to Italy to build Balsamiq Mockups, a plugin to create software UI mockups directly inside of Confluence. He is now making a good living through his Confluence plug-in offerings.

The third major component to Confluence 3.0 involves new community features. You can better connect with others, follow their activity and readily discover relevant content. Users can hover over a name and get information on the person and also navigate to that person’s profile. There is a twitter like status update with a 140 character limit. I like this feature and think that Twitter like features work best within the enterprise if they are connected with a comprehensive platform like Confluence, rather than acting standalone.

Atlassian also recently offered their own Stimulus Package. You could purchase $5 licenses for JIRA and Confluence, with all proceeds donated to charity. They hoped to raise $25,000 for Room to Read and ended up raising over $100,000. This was a great idea and I am pleased it was rewarded. Room to Read will be able to build 25 libraries for children in developing nations with the money.

Another Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Sharing Success Story - VistaWiki

VistaPrint is an online supplier of graphic design services and customized printed products to small businesses and consumers. I spoke with Dan Barrett, who led the implementation of their enterprise wiki for knowledge sharing, VistaWiki. Dan is a software developer but has always been interested in the intersection of technology and people. He recently published the O’Reilly book, MediaWiki.

Three years ago VistaPrint was concerned about their intranet and its inability to handle their growing knowledge sharing needs. They had plans to hire a number of recent college graduates and many of their process and practices were not documented. Dan, recognizing that knowledge management is a “people” problem more than a software problem, began the process of designing the new system independent of technology. The software development organization was chosen as the first place to implement the new system. Dan led focus groups to define the information needs and develop a taxonomy to address these requirements. Only then did they look at technology.

MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, was selected. They started by creating over 1,000 blank wiki pages covering the complete taxonomy and related processes. This was counter to the Wikipedia advice to never provide blank pages but Dan wanted to offer a structure for employees to document knowledge. Employees now simply needed to fill in the blanks and they did not have to address structural issues. This simplified the effort and content was quickly generated.

Dan’s team monitored the content to refine it and add links. They also monitored group emails. Whenever anyone supplied content that would best fit in the wiki, this team could offer a specific home for this content within the pre-established structure of the wiki. People got the message and more content went directly into the wiki, reducing the load on email. It became very popular within software development. In the first six months they had more content than the prior intranet had managed to gather in three years.

Based on this initial popularity ten other departments lined up to have a wiki for their use. At this point, Dan advocated for an enterprise wiki rather than ten separate efforts. This enterprise effort was approved and taxonomies were developed for the rest of the organization. Dan’s team continued to monitor and refine content but the scope has called for them to recruit people in the other departments to help with this effort to keep the quality level high. When they went beyond the software developers, Dan tested business users to see it they could learn wiki mark-up language. It was not a problem.

They also created wiki extensions to further the capabilities of VistaWiki. Now you can see live data, such as sales figures, feed directly from other enterprise systems. It has become a central clearing house for all company data. Over 80% of central office employees are registered wiki users. They have created over 20,000 articles. The average number of articles per employee is 40 but there is wide variance here. There have been 175,000 page edits with over 15,000 per month.

VistaPrint employees found using the wiki format valuable for many reasons including: ease of use (based on open-source code), ability to track “live” documents and the simplicity of the design layout. I think it is great example of how to successfully implement a comprehensive enterprise wiki and a demonstration of its value.

Novell GroupWise 8 Brings Enterprise 2.0 Capability to Personal Productivity Functions

I have visited Novell and written about they use wikis within their own enterprise (see Making Wikis Work at Novell) So I was interested when they approached me about a new product in the enterprise 2.0 space. I spoke with Wendy Steinle – Director of Product Marketing at Novell, Alex Evans – Product Manager, Groupwise, and Travis Grandpre – Product Marketing Manager about GroupWise® 8, their cross-platform e-mail and calendaring solution. I have With support for Windows, Linux, Mac, and the Web, GroupWise 8 gives customers a personal productivity solution at a low total cost of ownership. It offers a customizable dashboard that allows users to interact with traditional tools such as e-mail, calendar, contacts and task lists, as well as leverage popular Web 2.0-enabled team workspaces, blogs, RSS feeds and applications.

People are still wedded to email for many communication and collaboration functions. GroupWise 8 provides a means to connect traditional tools such as email with enterprise 2.0 applications. It allows you to have access to multiple applications through a single interface. It looks at four main aspects of personal productivity: time management, task management, contact management, and interaction with enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools. These are all exposed through the Home Views as seen in the screen shot below.

GroupWise 8 acts like a mashup but in a Windows, Linux, or Mac client. You can customize the interface with multiple columns to include as much or as little as you want. As we discussed, this is a completely different approach than I find on my Mac desktop where email, calendaring, and contact management are all in separate applications that are opened in individual windows. The Novell team pointed out that going back and forth between all these separate windows can result in confusion and extra time finding the right app. I would not disagree based on my own experience. The addition of web panels brings in the Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world. You can maximize or minimize each of the panels within the desktop by double clicking on the header. You can also create multiple home views – each customized for maximum productivity for different projects, roles, etc. (e.g. a home view for primary job responsibility, a home view for a particular trip or project, a home view for personal needs, etc.).

The calendar function allows you to reach outside the enterprise to check the calendars of anyone operating a calendar open to “busy checking.” Novell uses the Apple iCal protocol for this and it works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Google gmail but ironically not iCal at this point. Alex mentioned that the Danish government recently spent about $800,000 (US) to “busy check” enable across their various calendar applications and reported that this saved them cost savings on over $10,000,000 (US). This feature is now available out of the box with Groupwise 8. See screen shot below.

The GroupWise 8 task management feature allows you to drag and drop items from email into a personal task management function. You can then create parent and child relationships between tasks and have multiple layer hierarchies. This capability will integrate with tools such as Microsoft project and many of the enterprise 2.0 project management tools that have open APIs. You can also launch these tools within the GroupWise 8 workspace. It also works with Novell’s own Teaming + Conferencing application that includes blogs and wikis.

The contact management allows users to embed relevant information like maps, photos and personal details into the contact file, providing a single location to help track, manage and build their business relationships. It also allows you to browse by photos, a nice feature. And, within a contact, you can see all communications with that person and add your own notes so your discussion history and next steps are at your fingertips. You can also search across components within the suite.See the screen shot below.

GroupWise 8 supports hundreds of mobile devices, including iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm. See the Novell site on GroupWise for more details. It looks like a very useful package that serves as a connection between old school communication and collaboration tools and enterprise 2.0

Four Examples of Wikis Working within the Enterprise

A recent Computerworld article, Wikis that work: Four IT departments get it right, provides early adopters success stories at Enel, ShoreBank, NYK, and SAP. The first two used Traction Team Page, NYK used Atlassian's Confluence and the SAP example did not mention a vendor. This is a comprehensive article that goes into good detail on each example. I recommend looking at the complete coverage.

Enel used wikis as a way to make IT materials more accessible to their end users. They now achieve self-service for IT information that was previously delivered through e-mail or over an intranet. They also use the platform as a central hub for network and license information instead of storing the data in separate Word documents. In this capacity, they take advantage of TeamPage's security features to ensure that information is only accessible to approved IT staff. Enel also continues to use the wiki as a project management tool (see – Making Wikis Work at Novell). I have covered the Shore Bank example before and project management is one of the main uses (see - Another Enterprise Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction – Shore Bank).

NYK Group, the logistics and trucking arm of Japan-based container and shipping company NYK Logistics, is using an enterprise wiki within its IT department for a number of tasks: project management, change management and knowledge management. For example, instead of using broadcast e-mails on hardware changes or software upgrades, IT now notifies anyone affected by the changes via a wiki with subscription notification capabilities. Separately, NYK uses a wiki to keep multiple peer IT groups in the loop on the status of various projects.

SAP's Software Developer Network (SDN) wiki is a reference and collaboration tool for more than 1 million independent SAP software developers. It uses a point system to encourage participation and recognize its most active and valued members. As Beth writes, under the SAP Contributor Recognition program, members are awarded points for every technical article, code sample, blog post and wiki contribution they make. SDN employees rank wiki posts based on their content and value to the community. I have covered the

From these examples, it seems that once a wiki gets launched in an organization, many new uses spring up. I have heard of this many times before and it is nice to see the pattern repeated. Thanks to Jordan Frank of Traction who alerted me to this article.

Wikis in Knowledge Management at Law Firms – Part Two: Sharepoint Example

As mentioned in my last post, I recently attended an event on knowledge management and web 2.0 held at a major Boston law firm for people who work in knowledge management at legal firms. I served on a panel, Blogging as Knowledge Management. Here are my notes on the second part of the following session on wikis in knowledge management. It covers a Sharepoint example.

This firm already had Sharepoint which offers a wiki so they made use of this option. The wiki use cases include: meeting management, project management, knowledge discovery and sharing, as well as knowledge management. The Sharepoint wiki provides ease of use. The categories work well and provide good ability to create them for wiki pages. The categories work like tagging. They also use RSS on all the wikis for updates.

There are currently a couple of problems with the wiki. Notifications provide you the entire document and not simply the change area. This gives too much data in some cases, especially for large wiki pages. Also, the checkout allows two people to work on the same document at the same time. Then whoever saves first wins.

On the positive side it has greatly promoted content contribution. They have 800 wiki pages in four months. In comparison 500 pages were created on the intranet in 5 years. There are many boosters with some pockets of resistance. To be successful, you need the top person in a group to participate. This promotes real engagement.
The material is also easy to find since in Sharepoint search, the wiki and wiki pages tend to come up on top.

Several best practice suggestions were offered. Set a link to home page on each page. In addition place a “see also” at the bottom of each page. Show a change when a link goes to new type of resource such as a move to a Word document versus a wiki page. Place a RSS button on every home page.

Prior to our session Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence, AIIM, and Carl Frappaolo, VP Market Intelligence, AIIM, offered an excellent session: Does Enterprise 2.0 = 2 Knowledge Management 2.0. See Ron Friedmann’s post on the session. He said it was “one of the more interesting KM sessions I’ve attended in a while.“

I do not think Enterprise 2.0 and KM are the exactly the same thing and Carl and Dan did not seem to literally imply this. However, I think there is huge overlap. Enterprise 2.0 also provides a new opportunity to implement the principles of knowledge management broader within the enterprise. In addition, it offers knowledge managers an opportunity to play a larger role in their organizations providing a leadership role as they implement enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Jack Vinson also covers this session in his post, NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston. Carl Frappaolo offers access to the slides in his post, KM, E2.0 and The Law.

Wikis in Knowledge Management at Law Firms – Part One: ThoughtFarmer Example

I recently attended an event on knowledge management and web 2.0 held at a major Boston law firm for people who work in knowledge management at legal firms. I served on a panel, Blogging as Knowledge Management. Jack Vinson, who also served on the panel covered our session in his post, NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston, so I defer to him. I tend to get caught up in the conversation and find it hard to blog a session that I am involved with.

However, I did take notes on the excellent following session about wikis use in law firms, primarily for knowledge management. It was led by two experienced knowledge management professionals with major firms. They shared their experiences within their firms. The two examples make for interesting contrasting examples. A third of the audience also said they use wikis in their law firms.

The first example was a Canadian law firm with 100 lawyers and 100 support staff. Prior to the wiki, documents were stored individually in folders on a shared drive with no consistency. People did not attempt to find them there but sent emails to colleagues to find stuff. I have talked with a number of firms where this occurs, There was also no search engine on the old intranet. IT was under staffed with too many projects to fix this issue. So the knowledge management people looked at wikis. They were already using Domino so they choose the Domino wiki for their initial effort. The IT people were happy because it was inside firewall.

IT set up a shell structure for the wikis and then KM took over. There were wikis for different practice groups and they were searchable. There was one for content management with tags to narrow the browsing. Another group set up a wiki for contact information with the courts and other places. A third group set up a wiki for employment contracts with links to leading cases. There was also a wiki for students for educational materials

Their early success created a big demand. Every group wanted wikis. Updating was given to assistants, clerks & associates. However the technology was not perfect. You had to sign on separately for each wiki and they were creating silos of information. To solve this issue they looked at a number of enterprise tools and found most too feature rich and complex for lawyers to use them.

They went with Thought Farmer for its simplicity and ease of interface. (see my review - ThoughtFarmer – Intranet 2.0). It has Web 2.0 features – staff profile, tagging, RSS, social networking, email publishing, - also search with relevancy ranking. They started with a pilot of 20 people for 2 months. Then after initial success they moved all data over to Thought Farmer for a May 12 launch.

The wiki was now the only intranet and document management system. It tracks recent changes and who did it and you can see their picture. KM allows others to add tags and supplements existing tags. Since May 12: 416 pages created, 776 documents added, 299 links crated 18 comments added.

The benefits from the wiki include enabling personal knowledge management within each person’s individual profile page. People added to their profiles: their commonly referred documents, their articles & presentations, It has also spread updating to others, improved collaboration, and made it easier to find information

The presenter’s thoughts on lessons learned include: select an easy to use tool, do not force participation, transfer the process of updating to groups and develop a process for each group. You should also offer training and share success stories. They held individual training in 10 to 15 minute sessions.

They have found that not all users will be active contributors and the ROI is hard to measure. The tool should also be more Blackberry friendly. However, overall it seems to be a great success. They are going to upgrade to the new version of Thought Farmer that will have blogs, forums, and calendar. This is enough for one day. Tomorrow I will cover a Sharepoint wiki example and also briefly mention the session which preceded ours.

Nuospace: An Easy-to-Use Wiki for the Rest of Us

I cross-posted this from the App Gap as I thought it might be useful to readers, like me, who have small operations. Mine, of course, is an enterprise of one but I am involved with some start-ups (hopefully to be revealed soon as they get out of stealth mode) where I could see this functionality as very useful. Even though they are designed to be simple, the interface and functions of regular wikis can be a bit complex for the average user and the same can be said for applications like Sharepoint. That extra complexity can be just enough drive them back to email for exchanging documents. I have seen this happen on a number of occasions. Nuospace is designed to address this issue for small to mid-size businesses who need a simple application that can let them escape from the spaghetti and chaos of email for exchanging documents and other simple collaboration tasks.

Nuospace is the first product of Brightside Software, founded in June 2007. A few weeks ago, I spoke with Dimitri Lisitski, co-founder of Brightside and leader of the Nuospace effort. It is their first product and will remain their main focus over the next few years. It is currently a SaaS offering but they plan to offer a version that can be hosted within the firewall in the third quarter of 2008. The key design principle behind Nouspace is to keep it simple and have it remain simple. However, they did not give up useful functionality for this simplicity. Dimitri took me through a demo.

Noupace allows you to set up a variety of pages. There are pages designed for document sharing, discussion forums, standard wiki pages for text creation, posts that work like blogs, and directories to organize the other pages. It was easy enough for me to use so that makes it pass the simplicity test. I especially liked the interface. The look of each set of pages was identical and the functionality was consistent so it was very easy to learn. With document sharing pages you can upload documents, invite others to participate in the editing, and make comments. Then you see on one page the evolving history of the documents and the comments. The same format is used for discussions and posting.

Currently, they offer the tool in a free trial version. The trial version can last forever but you are limited to 100 pages and 200 MB of storage. Then you can upgrade to a commercial account and the pricing depends on your usage. The commercial option will launch the end of this April. It will have SSL security and encryption for pages. You can also make anything confidential.

The plan is to keep the product simple which is a wise move. I heard what happen with Lotus Quickplace as it keep adding features as customers requested them until it lost its simplicity. Nuospace plans to adopt an integration strategy rather than an addition strategy. For example, instead of building a calendar feature, it will integrate with several leading calendars. It is also working on integration with Salesforce.com. I think they are taking the right path. This tool should liberate the non-technical business user from the tyranny of email for simple document exchange and collaboration, as well as a number of other group communication tasks.

Riding the Wiki Wiki Bus

I finally had a chance to ride the famous wiki wiki bus at the Honolulu airport. There was a sense of excitement to see the sign. However, it was not quick quick but slow slow. They insisted on waiting for a horde of people before they took us to our terminal. On well, another urban myth.

Wikipatterns Comments - Part Four - Bad or Anti-Patterns - Wiki vs. KM

This is the fourth of four posts comparing wiki use and knowledge management inspired by reading Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns. As I wrote in the prior posts, I found it interesting that many of more of the good behaviors, what Stewart calls patterns, were also good KM practices, while more of the bad behaviors or antipatterns are more unique to wikis. Here is his list of anitpatterns grouped by those I feel are found in KM and those that are new to wikis

KM Dejavue
Wikiphobia - there is always resistance to new ways, although people avoided KM even more if it did not align with work
Bean Counter - he talks about charge backs more here but in general ROI concerns can kill a good KM system, on the other hand a good KM system should improve business process measures, it is just that attribution can be contested. I always recommended that ROI measures look at process improvements and not generic “time savings.”
Empty Pages - negative version of seed it with content pattern
All-wiki-all-the -time - the KM champions can get too excited also
Wiki Paint Brush - we usually recommend that the words knowledge management not be used in the title of the system

More Wiki Unique
Do-It-All - relates more to a system with greater individual participation
Over Organizer - the KM users do not actively change the organization but they should be consulted on it and it needs to make sense to them
Wiki Troll - not in KM but in the old forums often found within KM
Sand Box - relates more to a system with greater individual participation
Manager Lockdown - not in KM but it was found in the old forums often found within KM
Too Much Structure - KM provides structure but it needs to make sense to the users and align with how they do work

The group of antipatterns found in KM relate more to any system for handling content while the antipatterns more unique to wikis relate more to a system with the greater individual participation found in wikis.

This concludes my discussion of KM versus wikis based on Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader. As I wrote at the beginning, I found it interesting to reflect on the differences and similarities between a top down system that required bottom up support and participation (aka KM) and a system that requires bottom up support and participation and offers a bottom up structure (aka wiki). I am sure there are many more comparison points. As I also mentioned in my first post, a good general review of the book can be found in Jevon MacDonald’s - wikipatterns - The First Enterprise 2.0 Playbook.

Wikipatterns Comments - Part Three - Good Patterns - Wiki vs. KM

This is the third of four posts comparing wiki use and knowledge management inspired by reading Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns I found it interesting that many more of the good behaviors, what Stewart calls patterns, were also good KM practices, while more of the bad behaviors or antipatterns are more unique to wikis. I do not think there is really anything profound here. It is likely because there is more freedom for individual behavior in a wiki than in traditional KM. Here is his list of patterns grouped by those I feel are found in good KM and those that are new to wikis

KM Dejavue
Wiki Champions - every successful KM project shad at least one of these and often they were several operating in a formal role.
Invitation - this often required incentives in KM
Starting Point - important for any change effort
Welcoming - marketing was important with KM
Barn Raising - worked well for smaller teams responsible for putting in KM content
Single Issue - same as above
Seed It with Content - of course
Content Alert - the KM champions would look for gaps and recruit people to fill them
New Employee Wiki - KM often used in new employee orientation
Document Business Processes - process aligned KM is the most successful

More Wiki Unique
Personal Spaces - profiles could be in KM systems but usually outside them
Intentional Error - we sometimes had “scavenger hunts” to find content hidden in the KM system to promote usage with prizes to find things, not the same thing but similar concept in a way.

In my next post, I discuss bad behavior patterns - Wiki vs. KM.

Wikipatterns Comments - Part Two - Pilot Guidelines

This is the second of four posts comparing wiki use and knowledge management inspired by reading Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns. For a good general review of the book in at the Fast Forward blog, see wikipatterns - The First Enterprise 2.0 Playbook by Jevon MacDonald. Stewart writes for wiki success start with a pilot. He lays out success factors for pilots. This was a common recommendation for KM, to establish value and create interest, as well as to test ideas. You wanted to get into a “pull” situation rather than a “push” mode to help with the adoption and behavior changes that KM required. The same is true for wikis. The greater flexibility and usage opportunities for wikis expands the pilot options.

Listed below are Stewart’s pilot success factors.

KM Dejavue
Establish a Time Frame - necessary for any good pilot but still good advice
Make it Representative - if you want to generalize the results and create demand elsewhere, you need to select an area and problem that more people will feel relates to their work
Keep it Compact - necessary for any good pilot but still good advice
Choose Participants Carefully - start with people who might be predisposed to participate in knowledge sharing or even better are already doing it and you are just providing a better tool
Seek or Be Sought - issue is important for any good pilot but still good advice, with Km I would more err on the side of hand picking participants
Wiki with a Purpose - see comments below on additions - because of the intrinsic value in wikis, discovery mode is more possible with wikis than KM, but having a purpose will always be better
Make it a Magnet - very good advice for KM, make people work within the system but doing such things as not responding to email requests directly outside the system but requiring them to engage within it
Be Firm and Think Long Term - Stewart says require people to stay within the wiki and this is also key for KM - stay with the guideline above to stay within the system

More Wiki Unique
Define House Rules - with more individual freedom, this is more of a wiki issue
Personal Spaces - this would be a benefit of a good KM system but less of a requirement
Never an Empty Space - again, with more individual freedom, this is more of a wiki issue

I would add these for KM but I feel they are actually less important for wiki use as the wiki could be first used for such tactical things as event planning to demonstrate the benefits enough for further adoption. However, the KM system would fail without being grounded in the following two since there is not an inherent benefit of the tool.
.
Select a Key Business Issue to Address
Align with a Business Process

In my next post, I discuss good behavior patterns - Wiki vs. KM.

Wikipatterns Comments - Part One - Wiki Uses

I recently read Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns, over several long plane trips, which I highly recommend. That is the book, not the plane trips. Not that it takes that long to read but I took it in bits, between other things, like editing my trip pictures and reading, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (alos highly recommended). Anyway, this was better to space out reading Stewart’s book as it is a great guide to go back to. Parts of it also took me back ten years ago to promoting knowledge management best practices. I found it interesting to reflect on the differences and similarities between a top down system that required bottom up support and participation (aka KM) and a system that requires bottom up support and participation and offers a bottom up structure (aka wiki). Now you might say that a wiki is a tool and KM is an approach. However, it seems that wikis are also very much about an approach, more than just a tool, and KM relied on tools to enable its approach. I think more comparisons are valid, especially since both are about content.

You can find a good general review of the book in at the Fast Forward blog, see wikipatterns - The First Enterprise 2.0 Playbook by Jevon MacDonald. I am going to cover my comments on the book in four parts and mainly draw comparisons to KM. I am going to start with Stewart’s excellent list of possible wiki uses. A wiki is a system for generating and organizing content and you can use for a KM system. However, because of the bottom up structure you can use it for many others things such as the following suggested by Stewart.

I took his uses and grouped them into three themes that represent what I think are the best functions for a wiki

1. Generating Ongoing Growing Lists of Content:
Peer Directory
Knowledgebase or Support Site

2. Group Work:
Manage Projects
Product Development
Event Planning
Document Creation (actually not on his list but this use is discussed and the book is an example)

3. Communication Platform:
Intranet or Extranet
Blogging
External Communication
Pubic Web Site

Knowledge management is really only about the first theme. I found that the knowledgebase works best when it is aligned with a business process (a work support site) and I assume this would also be the case with a wiki. I know of at least one instance where a general purpose wiki had trouble getting traction in an organization that uses wikis extensively for project related tasks. Of course, the products of the second theme can go into a KM system and KM can be contained within the second theme. Wikis have the potential to change the role of administrator as they lower the barriers to contribution. Administrators function more as monitor than gatekeepers as contributions do not go through them. However, administration does not go away. Even the wikipedia has to monitor and sometimes lock down on content disputes. Stewart gets more into behaviors with the patterns and anit-patterns I will cover in upcoming posts.

Video: Wikis in Plain English - Common Craft Blog

Here is a very useful introduction to wikis by Lee Lefever. The video uses planning a trip as the task. This is a wise choice as event planning is one of the “killer aps’ for wikis. Companies like IBM and Novell use wikis for event planning extensively.

In the video you can easily see how the common work space facilities collaboration over email. Thanks to Hylton Jolliffe for sharing this. enterprise 2.0 web 2.0

Wikipedia on Wikipediholics

Yes, there are Wikipediholics. I even know a few. Some of them naturally wrote about themselves, the Wikipediholics, in the Wikipedia in characteristic completeness. The article starts with this message.

“This page contains material which is kept because it is considered humorous. It is not intended, nor should it be used, for any research or serious use (unless the research is about Wikipedia itself).”

It goes on “A wikipediholic or wikiholic or wikipediaholic is someone with a serious addiction to anything involving the words "Wiki" and/or "Pedia" in the same word or sentence. It is often considered an obscure form of Obsessive-compulsive disorder.” No kidding but it may be growing enough to become no longer obscure. There is a test to see if you are one. I failed miserably just I did on the nerd test. Perhaps you can do better.

Wiki Week #4 - Wikis at Work – Mat Schwartz

Here is a useful, well-written introduction to wikis, Wikis at Work by Mat Schwartz. It is consistent with my experience. He writes that wikis are often brought in by IT but “Once a group of users adopts a wiki previously wiki-averse employees often join in.” He offers some good advice, while wikis are becoming hot, there must be a business purpose to their deployment for them to be useful. In addition, someone must guide a wiki’s implementation, then nurture it long-term for it to be successful. Just like KM or most other group oriented IT efforts. So if you need a good non-vendor intro to wikis here is one option. enterprise wikis

Wiki Week #3 - Making Wikis Work with Sharepont 2007

Here is a useful article by Mauro Carderelli on making wikis work with Sharepoint 2007. The new Sharepoint is Microsoft’s main play for Enterprise 2.0. It has templates for blogs and wikis, a social networking capability and RSS. Sharepoint has used site templates in the past to provide a framework for the layout of a particular page type (e.g., a team or meeting or social event) that presets placeholders for specific content. Sharepoint 2007 extends the use of site templates by introducing a new collection of template types, including wikis and blogs. It appears very easy to use from the descriptions on the article. enterprise wikis

Wiki Week #2 - Wiki Tips from the ALA

The ALA (American Library Association) has set up wikis to support their annual convention for the past two years. It was one of the conference wikis I wrote about yesterday. Not surprisingly they offer some good wiki editing tips to those who might want to use their Mediawiki effort. They also offer links to the Wikipedia Editing Fundamentals Page and the MediaWiki Handbook For Editors for more help on editing the wiki.

Meredith Wolfwater has led this effort and also offers her lessons learned. Here are the highlights that are useful to anyone doing a wiki. There is more detail in her post, ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it.

1. A wiki must have a specific purpose.
2. You can’t just offer a wiki to the public as a blank slate and expect participation
3. It’s good to add some content to the wiki before making it public
4. You need to make it very clear that people can add whatever they want to the wiki or they’ll ask you to do it instead of doing it themselves
5. Yes, spam is a problem, but a manageable one if you have enough loyal users
6. It is amazing to watch what a wiki can become (if you let the users be creative)

Like blogs, you also need some clear policy statements. Meredith offers sample guidelines for the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki that she started after her ALA experience. She has appropriately made the development of these guidelines a wiki effort. enterprise wikis

Conference Wikis – A Great Application

The rest of this week is on wikis. Last week I spoke the Professional Convention Managers Association on how they can open new lines of communication with blogs, podcasts, and wikis. Here is a bit on wikis. Next week I will cover conference blogs. While blogs are great to record the events, sessions, and the writers perspective, essentially a journalistic function, wikis can provide a broader space to allow for more in an accessible format such listings of resources, related events, things to do in the location, travel logistics, lists of attendees. Multiple people can add to these postings so it becomes a shared work space around everything to do with the event, including people’s spectives on sessions.

Here are four sample conference wikis that can give you a sense of the possibilities.

1. The Official Wiki for the 2006 American Library Association
(ALA) Annual Conference in New Orleans! - June 22-28, 2006 – as you can imagine given the expertise of the attendees this is a rich example.

2. PC Forum Eventspace - Socialtext's Ross Mayfield has put together an Eventspace wiki that is “chock full of information for this week's PC Forum. This seems like a great idea for anyone organizing an event.” Here are some of the categories: Announcements, Conversations (including Go ahead and start one on the 2005 Blog., IRC , Flickr Photo Stream, Technorati Cosmos of PC Forum, Ride Board). Other categories: Shared Notes, Sessions, People, Companies

3. 2006 O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) wiki – sample categores AttendeeList, Who is BloggingOSCON?, OScal a tool for discovering what's happening at oscon OScalMobile, Foscon Podcasts, WhereToFindSoda, EatDrinkManWoman, GettingAround, IRC and MySpace, RoomSharing, ThingsToDoAndSee, Weather forecast, SessionsOnGoogleCalendar, JobBoard. Note: the link to the wiki no longer works and I tested the one in Google and it no longer works

4. ASIST 2006 Annual Meeting Wiki (the American Society for Information Science and Technology) Since the conference is over, this wiki is now a read-only archive. Categories include (with some sub-categories in parenthesis) : Conference Program, Social Events, At the Conference (ASIST 2006 Meeting Blog | ASIST 2006 pictures on Flickr | Technorati Tags: asist2006), Austin Texas (Attractions | Restaurants | Hotels | Travel | Wireless Access | UT-Austin Wiki), Governance

As you can see there is a rich set of possibilities here. Meredith Farka wrote a very useful blog post, ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it, after the 2005 ALA conference - see above. Meredith also started, Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, "to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians." which deserves a separate review.

The KM World conference also had a conference wiki in 2005 but I could not find the 2006 one. enterprise wikis

What is in a Name – Wiki.com Goes for $3 M (US)

When I heard from John Maloney that John Gotts paid $3 million (US) for wiki.com. I assumed it was for the company. Especially when I checked out the site and there was a company there offering to help you set up a wiki. But he paid it for the URL, the domain name. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about this at Tech Crunch, Wiki.com partners with MindTouch, says $3m domain is a deal. At least it wasn’t EUs.
He said, “he has teamed with San Diego based wiki provider MindTouch to make a serious wiki play with the domain name at the center of their strategy. MindTouch does appear to offer a quality product…”

Some people have said it is a sure sign of the apocalypse or at the least the dot.com bust 2.0. I wonder how much the actual company is getting? I own the domain portalsandkm.com but have not done anything with it. You can email me with offers.

Wikis--a disruptive innovation – Cindy Gordon

Last week I wrote about wikis at work at Novell and Motorola. Here is an excellent wiki article, Wikis--a disruptive innovation, in the June issue KM World by my friend Cindy Gordon, CEO of Helix Commerce. She offfers a definiton of disruptive by author Clayton Christensen, - “where products or systems create new markets. Disruptive innovation patterns are difficult to see because they are complex and diffuse more rapidly.”

Cindy finds wikis falling into this category. She notes that in 2004, Gartner predicted that "a third of mainstream collaboration software products will support wiki-style interaction by 2006” and adds that Microsoft's fall release of Sharepoint will include wiki functionality. There are a number of examples of wikis use in financial servcies frims such as Bank of America and Citicorp. Other non-IT firms covered include Glaxo Smith Kline and West Toronto Support Services, a health services frim. I wrote about the wiki use of Novell and Motorola last week. Wikis use is growing behind the firewall and I agree with Cindy’s prediction that wikis will be a disruptive innovation.

Many Wikis Working at Motorola

Yesterday I talked about wikis at Novell. Here is more about what is happening at Motorola. Cesar Brea sent me this link to a podcast discussion by Dan Bricklin with Toby Redshaw, Motorola's Corporate Vice President of Information Technology Strategy, Architecture & e-Business. He told Dan that “Motorola, #49 on the Fortune 500, has almost 2,000 internal wikis (that's separate wikis, each with many pages), and 2,700 blogs used by 60,000 of their 68,000 employees daily. 4,000-5,000 people are actively contributing, the rest mainly read.”Toby describes on the podcast what wikis and blogs are used for, how they rolled them out, what benefits they get, how they chose what they did, experience with bad behavior, etc. He also talked with Dan about “how wikis really helped save them time by getting around the need for a web specialist to maintain many important pages.” This is a very important benefit of wikis. I saw this happening on the Katrina missing person data base effort.

Making Wikis Work at Novell

Wikis are spreading behind the firewall. Here is one example. Novell uses wikis in a variety of ways, both within teams and across their enterprise. At the team level, they have become an important and integral part of software development. The open nature of wikis, coupled with their security behind the firewall, has led to using wikis in the many development phases that involve collaboration such as requirements generation, documentation, and bug fixes. In a cent conversation, Ray Sims, Principal, Global Knowledge & Learning, told me that, “many development teams now cannot imagine doing their work without wikis since the wiki’s accessibility provides significant productivity improvements over traditional methods such as email and siloed desktop applications.” To support wiki use within the enterprise, Novell has incorporated them into the single sign on authentication within their intranet. They have also integrated wiki content into enterprise search engines.

At the enterprise level Novell has found a variety of uses. For example, the sharing of ideas, articles, and commentary about specific ideas is now greatly facilitated through wikis, Ray Sims told us that now when he sees an article on a topic that is relevant to individuals within the enterprise, he can simply place a link to it with his comments to a wiki page that is accessible to everyone and have it available to enterprise searches. He finds this much more efficient than sending the link to an email list serve or mentioning it on a forum. Those who are interested in the topic can mark the page on their watch list and receive a notification when edits have been made. Then when they go to the page they also get the context for the link and all previous information on the topic in one place. This avoids the need to assemble threads to make sense of the material and understand the complete discussion. It also gives individuals the ability to select what topics they are notified on and the opportunity to engage in a dialog around the issues in an efficient manner in a common space. This common space also reduces redundancy in research efforts and makes the results available to all.

Novell now uses wikis as a standard means to facilitate event planning and management. When there is a company event, a wiki page is generally set up to support it. Attendees can share information on travel logistics to coordinate flights, car rentals, hotels, etc, in a manner far more efficient than the need to have administrative support people send out multiple emails to all attendees. In addition, the agendas can be refined and the substantive conversations started prior to the actual meeting, making the face to face time much more productive. The wiki then provides a common space to continue the conversation after the meeting. Ray says that people cannot imagine going back to the older, pre-wiki days for event coordination.

I think, in some ways. wikis are even more effective behind the enterprise firewall as security is much less an issue and generally the trusted environment where wikis work best is in place.

Blog and Wiki Workshops – Helix Commerce

Helix Commerce is a Toronto based consulting firm that specializes in collaborative commerce, knowledeg management, and related issues. The founder, Cindy Gordon, has recenlty published a book on Winning at Collaboration Commerce with Heidi Collins and Jose Claudio Terra. Helix Commerce is now offering introductory workshops in both blogs and wikis, as well as coaching and consulting in these two areas. I am pleased to team with them in this effort. The workshps cover practical business applications and key issues in getting started. You can find out more about these offerings at their site for both blogs and wikis. Or you can send me an email.

Helix Commerce is doing some innovative work with wikis in their consulting efforts. It deploys wiki solutions to improve its own collaboration with clients for project management and integrated communication needs. This practice provides a means for them to model collaborative solutions. Wikis are used to store proposals and contracts, all working matters of clientidelivery, project meeting notes, project plans, client deliverables, and iterative communications. Helix has found that clients appreciate the integrated environments as it saves them time in accessing email records, and having an audit inventory of all project communication practices in a central and secure repository. This also allows Helix to easily leave the wikis in client hands to continue to evolve and sustain project initiatives used the wiki, as Helix moves onto future client relationships.

Wikimania Links from Jessica Baumgart

Jessica Baumgart is an active member of the Berkman Thursday Blog group. She recently shared a series of links related to Wikimania 2006 which will be held in Boston.

Information about the Boston area Wikipedia Group and how it is participating in Wikimania is on their wiki, along with links to their discussion group and Meetup site.

The general e-mail list for Wikimania volunteers.

The list specifically for local Boston volunteers.

There are weekly Wikimania program meetings and occasionally meetings for other volunteers organized by various Wikimedia Foundation groups over IRC. In addition to that, people are often in the wikimania channel on freenode.net. The Wikimania wiki for information on this.

The Call for Participation in Wikimania incuding Proposals for presentations, panels, birds of a feather discussions and other sessions. The deadline is April 30th.

Authority of the Wikipedia

I recently went to an interesting session led by Dave Weinberger on the authority of the wikipedia at the Berkman Center. There is an available podcast of the event at the Berkman Center. There is an available podcast of the event at the Berkman center site. Dave started with the authority of knowledge, in general, as he is writing a book on the topic. He noted that authority can bring social status, institutional power, and control conversations. Academic institutions are given authority and can grant this authority to attendees. Academic journals are often see as the prime authority on many topics since contributions are reviewed by other authorities.

Dave noted that in the past journal space was limited, in part, because the supply of paper was limited. So only a limited amount of new content got recognized by the authorities. Now in a virtual world, the space for content is unlimited and the distribution means is cheap or almost free.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has over 500 steps to ensure accuracy and to claim to be an authority. It is often compared with the wikipedia where anyone can, in theory, make a contribution in one step. There have even been studies comparing the two, including the well known one by Nature. The wikipedia does have a list of quality standards and it is continuously reviewed by administrators and thousands of volunteers to make entries better and weed out spam or other inaccuracies. The wikipedia will also acknowledge if an article is in dispute, something that the mainstream media and sources like Britannica almost never do. One reason that paper based sources are reluctant to admit problems is that they are hard to fix. In a virtual world the fix is easy.

Wikipedia entries are generally of higher quality if the topic is important and many people contribute to it. The wisdom of crowds in practice. You can see the editing history of a contribution. However, since the wikipedia does not require contributors to give their actual names, it can be hard to know who did what. Some people like Dave are open about their contributions and use their own name.

Dave discussed the concept of “negotiated” truth. The various contributors may get into an editing war over the contents of an article such as one on a political figure. The only way these editing wars can stop is for the various parties to reach a common agreement on a version that attempt to provide a “neutral point of view” and/or an acknowledgement of the various views. If the wars do not stop, the wikipedia staff can lock down the content of an article but this is the exception and represents a failure of negotiations.

I looked at the term “Web 2.0” which remains controversial and the article noted this. The article included what appeared to be some careful wording that was likely negotiated. It also listed sources that we for and against the concept. I will write separately on the details but it seems to be a good example of a negotiated truth. The assassination of JFK is another example where every theory on the event is listed, even the most farfetched

There is no negotiation with other authorities like the Britannica, except to make some suggestions for the next edition which may or may not reach the right ears. The extent to which the “authorities” are closed to multiple views turns knowledge into fundamentalism. I am not suggesting that the Britannica falls into this category, but certain truths are relative and changing. The wikipedia can provide an open platform to negotiate these truths and keep them evolving. Imagine wikipedia descriptions of the universe or the laws of physics in past centuries. Better to have the people participate in these definitions than have the Inquisition do it. On the other hand, I see polls that say the majority of Americans believe in creationism as a science. There is balance to be reached here.

I looked at the wikipedia article on creationism. It is quite long and comprehensive with many viewpoints. I think it maintains a neutral point of view that people on all sides would feel like they were represented in a neutral manner. The wording is very careful and likely the result of a virtual negotiation process. I thought it was very fair. I think it will be interesting to see how the wikipedia handles other controversial topics. This seems to be one of its strengths.

At the moment most teachers do not accept the wikipedia as a source for papers. It has even been said that Jimmy Wales, founder of the wikipedia, agreed with this position in an interview. On the other hand it is a good source for ideas and often contains links to many primary sources by noted authorities.

Wikis at Work at Helix Commerce

Wikis are becoming more common. As most people now know, they are server software that allows users to freely create and edit web pages. Anyone can edit any page and it works best within a trusted environment. The Wikipedia, has developed thousands of volunteers who police the site. Attempts to spam or deface it are often corrected within minutes without most users not even noticing. However, this is not possible or practical for most internet applications. The vulnerability created by the openness of wikis largely disappears behind the firewall where there is more control over access and participation. As a result, there have been many and varied applications of wikis within enterprise intranets.

It seems that once wikis appear behind the firewall their ability to save time quickly gains converts and they proliferate. Here are a few examples I have read about recently in an article, Wikis at Work. At Nokia, wikis were first brought in by the corporate strategy group to make the task of storing and distributing corporate intelligence more efficient. Now there are many applications across the organization. A similar sequence occurred at the Canadian Meteorological Centre. An engineer first brought in a wiki, convinced his boss of its value. Soon a number of additional wikis were operating. The publisher Ziff Davis installed wikis to accelerate project cycles and found they reduces group emails from 100 per day to zero. The Gennova Group, a Boston based association of consultants had similar results as I wrote in Working with Wikis: Part 2.

Last week I was up in Toronto to visit my friends at Helix Commerce. One of their major service offerings is Collaborative Commerce and Cindy Gordon, their CEO recently co-authored a book on the subject, Winning at Collaborative Commerce. As a good example of doing what you encourage and advise others to do, Helix deploys wiki solutions to improve its own collaboration with clients for project management and integrated communication needs. It provides a means for them to model collaborative solutions. Wikis are used to store proposals and contracts, all working matters of client delivery, project meeting notes, project plans, client deliverables, and iterative communications. Helix has found that clients appreciate the integrated environments as it saves them time in accessing email records, and having an audit inventory of all project communication practices in a central and secure repository. This also allows Helix to easily leave the wikis in client hands to continue to evolve and sustain project initiatives used the wiki, as Helix moves onto future client relationships.

TiddlyWiki: Non-linear content surfing

Demir Barlas writes about a new blog like wiki tool in TiddlyWiki 101 in the latest online issue of Portals Magazine. He quotes Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, "A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks (tiddlers), but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole."

I went to Demir’s web site, Ruyakunst, which uses TiddlyWiki. It features his novels and you can link to them as you wish, rather than the more sequential nature of blogs. It is a bit confusing however, as you can appear to make changes to his site, wiki style, but apparently you cannot save them. I had no desire to make any real changes to his site so I did not push it. If he is using it with the edit function only in the author’s hands it is like a non-sequential blog with hyperlinking as described. It is not really a wiki then since group editing is not allowed.

Demir gives a good business application in his article. I can also see business applications for this when you want to be able to move around, although I can use the search function on my blog for the same movement. I am interested in more thoughts on the wiki versus blog issue. I wonder if others are using wikis as their blogs?

Wikicalc - Dan Bricklin’s New Tool

I see that Dan Bricklin, co-creator of Visiclac, is up to new things. He has taken wikis to a next step. As the wikicalc site says, “The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet…wikiCalc is currently released in Alpha test. This means that it is largely untested, has bugs, and is missing features that will hopefully be in the 1.0 release (and Beta versions leading up to that).” There is more detail on what he is doing in this blog post by Dan on wikicalc.

Corporate Wiki Users - Win an iPod

If you are an active user/contributor to a company wiki, consider taking this survey from Professor Ann Majchrzak, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California by November 27th and have your name entered into a raffle for an iPod Nano. I got this from several people, including John Maloney and Adriann Jooste of Deloitte, so thought I would pass it on.

Wikimania 2006 - Boston? - Yes!

The Boston Wikipedians developed a formal bid to host Wikimania 2006, the second international Wikimedia conference, sometime next summer. Here is a wiki post on the Boston wikimania effort. Sam Klein is playing a lead role in this effort. The first wikimania program was in Germany and had large number of sessions and international attendees. I just learned that Boston won, beating out Toronto which was the other finalist. More details to follow.

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution

In case you were wondering The Onion reported last week that: “Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.”

So much for open source government. Thanks to Garrett Eastman for sharing this.

Wikipedia Writing and Media Contest

The Wikipedia is a having a contest for best media articles. It closes August 7. The article categories cover a variety of topics history, media, culture, etc. The media portion includes various drawings, diagrams, photography, video audio, etc. You can the rules and entries to date at the Wikipedia contest site.

Wikipedia meets Berkman

Jessica Baumgart and Dave Winer have reported that Jimmy Wales of the Wikipedia will become a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The Wikipedia is having a Fund Raiser

I have written about the wikipedia on numerous occasions and I am a frequent user. John Maloney alerted me to this wikipedia fund raiser which deserves attention.

Wikipedia and Copyrights – Pito Salas

Pito Salas raises a very interesting question about the wikipedia on his blog, Pito’s Blog – some stuff I just figured out. He notices that information about the musical Hair is the same on the wikipedia and on Freedictionary.com. Pito wonders which entry was the original as neither source cites the other. I have also noticed this on other topics where I found the wikipedia entry to be a copy of something else or the reverse.

This raises some interesting attribution and possibly copyright information questions.

Resources on Wikis - Jessica Baumgart

Here is a list of resources about wikis from Jessica Baumgart.  I am putting this in total both as a service to anyone reading this but also to see if TypePad copies links over automatically. And it does for the most part - missed one which I put in manually.

• Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool in Searcher, April 2003: gives basic information about wikis as well as listing wiki software and comparing wikis and blogs
• The National Science Digital Library is using wikis.
• The Associated Press explores the technology and mentions one of the most popular wikis: Wikipedia
• A thesis about wikis and collaboration (.pdf) by Jonathan Davies at the University of York (UK) (Thanks, CP!)
• Of course, Wikipedia has an entry on the wiki with links to additional resources
• LLRX.com published Enter the World of the "Wiki", which provides a brief introduction to wiki software and how businesses might use wikis.
• CMS Review (CMS = Content Management Systems) has a section about wikis, including a directory of wiki software.
• BusinessWeek published two articles about wikis this summer.
• eopwiki, one of the kinds of wikis, has some FAQs about wikis, including Getting Your Wiki Adopted.

BestWikiIntroEver – Brian Lamb

Brian Lamb provides, in the EDUCAUSE Review, one of the best introductions to wikis that I have seen. I found his work through Many 2 Many. He starts with a quote from the jazz bass player, Charlie Mingus.

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. “

I have used a similar thought from Einstein in talks but will now switch to Mingus, one of my favorite musicians. Brian lists the four essential characteristics of wikis:

- Anyone can change anything.

- Wikis use simplified hypertext markup.

- WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether.

- Content is ego-less, time-less, and never finished.

The last feature, like the use of the personal voice in blogs, is derivative of the technology and not required by the tool. So it is the easiest one to violate when using wiki software. But is also the most important of the defining features. It frames the proper place for wikis. If the content needs to be considered “finished” such as a procedures manual, then wikis are not a good final content repository. A blog could take over here. If the content is in flux, such as the creation of the taxonomy and draft content for a procedures manual, then wikis can be a uniquely invaluable tool.

Wikis are a cousin to blogs because they both promote the bottom up generation of content and ideas. But they are different and should be used differently. Blogs provide a means for the personal voice or a collection of personal voices and they allow for the connection and exchange of personal voices. For many uses, this is essential. Wikis provide a means for the group voice. The personal voice gets absorbed within the group voice, but for many tasks this is a good thing.

Brian provides a great response to standard objections to wikis. “Think of an open wiki space as a home that leaves its front door unlocked but doesn’t get robbed because the neighbors are all out on their front steps gossiping, keeping a friendly eye on the street, and never missing a thing. This ethic is at the heart of “SoftSecurity,” which relies on the community, rather than technology, to enforce order.”

Studies have shown that mistakes intentionally added to the wikipedia are fixed with minutes. Governance is in the hands of the users and depends on the health of the community rather than the features of the tool. Like blogs, authentication of wiki content is flipped. It becomes democratic and is now the individual responsibility of the readers.

Brian also addresses the concern that the interface can be ugly. I agree with his counter point, that “the quality is deep, not at the surface.” The focus becomes the content and not the decoration. It reminds me of a line from the Frank Sinatra song about New York, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” The content has to stand on its own merits.

Wikis give us a new freedom and new responsibilities. A first step is getting re-oriented to the openness. Brian quotes, Bob Dylan, “I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.” The next step is creating a unique order to this chaos. Brian quotes Vita Sackville West, “It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.”

These are just the highlights. Brian offers much more.

More on the Wikipedia Debate

The Wikipedia debate continues. Here is a nice post from Many2Many which links to Ed Felton’s Wikipedia vs. Britannica Online comparison. Felton concludes:

“Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.”

The Great Wikipedia Authority Debate

Here is a nice summary of the debate over the wikipedia by Ernest Miller in Corante. I think there are good points in defense of the wikipedia. I have posted on it as good for clues or starting points but in need of further validation. I may have underestimated the fact checking.

I used the wikipedia a lot and now have renewed confidence in it.

Wikipedia: Fact, Fiction, or Useful Clues?

Steven Cohen quotes Simon who runs the Valis blog, on the wikipedia, a resource I use a lot.

“Anyway, I've been very interested in some of the social tools I've been playing with recently. I made my first contribution to Wikipedia a few days ago. What's interesting to me is the whole notion of group accountability. The traditional approach to creating and organising knowledge assumes that this should be the task of experts - and this is what we're taught in library school - when we evaluate resources we look to the credibility of the author/editor/publisher. Now Wikipedia challenges that - it's not "organised", and contributions are made by anonymous posters, who could be anybody. Yet it works. Sure, anyone could edit a record to reflect a partisan agenda, or as a prank. But dozens of other people would correct it. A self-correcting system.”

The wikipedia is great but I think the level of fact checking needs to be acknowledged. I often see the source for a wikipedia entry when I search on a topic, especially when I have been looking at people like musicians. The wikipedia entry is simply pasted from another source but you do not know this source. For this reason, the wikipedia information should be seen as clues that need to be verified.

I discovered this in doing family history research where hundreds of family web sites would repeat the same unsubstantiated information until it became an accepted “fact.” I challenged some people on “facts” that had no primary source and they had become true believers because these “facts” were “well known.” The real genealogy researchers see the information on the web sites as simply clues that need to be verified, still useful in that context. While I think the wikipedia information is much more reliable than genealogy web sites, I still think the same can be said for the wikipedia. Unless there is primary references sources that can be checked, I would see the wikipedia as useful clues but not necessarily facts.

NewYorkWiki

Steve Rubel, who writes Micro Persuasion, provides a link to “a collaborative community that's writing the ultimate reference of every person, place, and thing in New York City. Anyone can write or edit the Web site.” You can add your home or building to the street map.

It’s the wikipedia for NYC. Bu then the wikipedia already has a lot on New York City.

So far it is fairly barren but a good idea. I noticed there is nothing in the wiki on sports but then, outside of baseball, there in not much for New Yorkers to talk about recently.

dotNetInfluencers.org: a working wiki

Scoble points to a good example of a wiki. dotNetInfluencers.org is “a Wiki devoted to allowing influencial .NET developers to document their activities and present it to the world. A CoreGroup of people are working to drive the goals of this wiki along the lines discussed below. If you would like to contribute and become one of the core members, please contact MikeSchinkel. (President and Founder of Xtras.Net).”

The site goes on to add: “Mike saw the need for years to provide the .NET community with a registry of influencers to help them market themselves and to help those who could use their services locate them. However, running Xtras.Net has always required too much of his time and such a project was too big to tackle on his own. Recently Mike realized he could leverage the entire community of .NET influencers using a Wiki to build just such a registry because it would benefit everyone in the community, especially the influencers themselves. “

To avoid the chaos that might result form a wiki, the site has a purpose, goals, rules, and a profile of who might be accepted to contribute. A part of the objective, helping a group better understand its individual members, is somewhat similar to the use of wiki by the Gennova Group that I discussed earlier. In both cases, the evolving nature of the content lends itself well to a wiki.

Wiki, Bliki, and KM

Ross Mayfield provides a link to Denham Grey’s thoughts on his company's use of wiki and KM. Denham sees the major benefits of wikis as:

- Easy way to get folks publishing on the web (3 minutes!) rather like blogs

- A great environment for collaborative writing

- Space for capturing and refining patterns - proven solutions to repetitive issues

- Wiki is good for dialog, annotation, annealing and refactoring - all important ways to engage with text

- Emerging tool for capturing corporate memory, e.g. we are using a Bliki combo Wiki / Blog to gather process stories, record subtle changes in equipment parameters, track the rationale for test batches and gather customer innovations at our helpdesk.

Denham also notes a business school using a wiki for surveys. Ross suggests that the benefit of doing so (compared to forms) is the ability of survey participants to provide greater qualitative insight and stories in the process.

Denham’s points are well taken and consistent with what I have found so far. I think the survey idea is excellent. The only caveat with any use of wiki/bliki is the need to operate in a trusted environment.

Follow up on Wikis

Shimon Rura offers some interesting observations on wikis. He concludes:

“Wikis are for small, purposeful, long-term collaborative efforts. If a wiki has over 20 participants and no clearly defined work-product—i.e. a type of document to be developed on the wiki itself, such as product specifications—it will bewilder new users due to its lack of simple organizing logic or obvious ways to acquire context.

Wikis do better to focus on a few work-products that evolve gradually than many work-products that frequently become obsolete. Wikis save everything, and do not give priority to recent entries. Constant new entries dilute the purpose of the wiki and it's hard to evaluate which of two conflicting entries represents current thinking.”

I agree with Shimon and think the key here is that wikis need a purpose. Their total lack of structure requires a clearly defined collaborative task to avoid chaos. I also think their role in business is limited but they become a huge productivity gain for the times that suit them. I think there is no better tool than a wiki when:

- It involves the input of many people in a virtual, asynchronous manner. The voice of the group is more important than the voice of the individuals.

- The task is clearly defined but the organization of the content, as well as the content itself, is in flux (e.g., developing a taxonomy, planning both the focus and agenda for an event).

- The participants know each other and have a trusting relationship. Disruptive, unproductive behavior is not tolerated by the group and people are motivated to participate.

- The tool needs to be transparent to the task and intuitive for a wide range of participants with different technical backgrounds. In this case, the simplicity of the wiki will allow for the participants to focus on the task and not the tool.

- The wiki is a vehicle to assist in the early stages of a joint task and not an end in itself. Ideally, it sets up a synchronous, or same time, exchange where differences can be resolved. It could also be the place to record thoughts between a series of these meetings.

However, for the contents of the wiki to evolve beyond a rough planning guide, it may need the editorship of a few people (or one person) to take the raw material and refine it. See below for Shimon’s links to an extension of wikis – blikis.

Blog plus Wiki Equals Bliki

Just when it was starting to make sense, I learned about blikis. Shimon Rura provides a link to site describing, Cardboard, a combined blog and wiki tool or a “bliki” as well as a post by Martin Fowler who was not happy with blogs or wikis so he also combined them into a bliki. Martin says, “Like a blog, it allows me to post short thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces that I hope will still be interesting in a year's time. I intend to use this to post ideas that are forming, but either too immature or too short for a proper article.”

Shimon also gives a link to the Wikipedia’s definition of Bliki and sample links.

“A bliki is a weblog with wiki support. Which means that after (or before) an article is posted to the blog, it can be edited, either by anyone or by some some group of authorized users. This combination of the two Internet technologies was conceived with the purpose of making the popular "blogging" experience more interactive…”

I liked the simplicity of both blogs and wikis for their respective tasks. I am not sure of the benefits of combining them. It seems like a “Swiss Army knife” solution instead of simply using the right tool for the right task. However, I am just beginning to understand the uses of blogs and wikis so I could easily be missing something here.