Wikis for intra-company usage are becoming well established as both commercial and open source applications. This article gives an overview of criteria and requirements involved in the decision making process, along with a comparison of our proprietary Wiki Confluence System and its open source competitors, Foswiki and MediaWiki.
All wiki systems have the same basic functions: opening, editing and saving documents. These functions can be covered in a single Wikipedia paragraph. The functions of a more advanced business wiki, however, are more complex. A business wiki is not simply a web lexicon, but rather is intended to systematically handle a variety of processes in the company.
Wikipedia is by far the best-known example of a wiki. This web lexicon is what most people immediately think of when they hear the word wiki. It’s not surprising, since the online encyclopedia is used by millions of people every day. However, Wikipedia is something completely different from a wiki that is used in a corporate intranet.
In the first article on the differences between a company’s intranet and website, we addressed organizational questions and described how these systems differ conceptually. From a technical perspective as well, intranet and web projects must be approached differently to meet the various needs of the user groups.
You do not need to be an Internet professional to recognize the basic difference between a company’s intranet and its online presence. An intranet, the internal system, is protected against external access and contains non-public information. Online content, however, can be accessed by anyone. If you take a closer look, it’s clear that many different aspects must be considered and play an important role. We will therefore turn our attention in these two articles to the question of how to differentiate between an intranet and a website. First, we will look at the organizational aspects before dealing with the technical aspects in the following article.
In general, the establishing of a wiki must be supported through a series of measures. If these activities are successful, the system – as I know from my own experience – will quickly be accepted and used by employees. At //SEIBERT/MEDIA, TWiki has been used since June 2007, now containing a total of eight Webs. The main Web alone grew to contain more than 1000 topics within just a few months.
Whoever is on the lookout for a simpler, slimmer solution that can be implemented much more quickly will find Confluence to be an extremely sophisticated package. In contrast to SharePoint, Confluence can be easily and successfully introduced without complications. And it can even be connected with SharePoint.
If in the opening phase of a wiki adoption it should be difficult to activate employees to participate, this is often because employees haven’t been properly brought up to speed and misunderstand the whole idea of a wiki. One symptom of this is the fear of sharing knowledge.
Within a company there can be many approaches for the development of texts as well as the sharing of texts for further revision. We could, for example, write a text in Word and then load the final version into the enterprise wiki. We could also send around texts by e-mail, asking colleagues to read them and, if necessary, to make changes. But we could also develop a text directly within a wiki. What should we think of this particular work process?
At //SEIBERT/MEDIA, we’ve been working on a wiki for years. Through our day-to-day work as well as through dozens of enterprise wiki projects, we have experienced – thanks to innumerable different cases – how useful and valuable a wiki can be on a number of levels. Therefore, we believe it is high time to compress the arguments for a wiki into the limited space offered by tweets to make our points as efficiently as possible.
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