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Are we Headed for a Wiki World?
Wikipedian writes "BusinessWeek
asks are
we headed for a Wiki World?. With
US-based SocialText
using their wiki to leverage just $600K in capital, and
European competitor Team Notepad,
not to mention freeware alternatives like
TWiki and
MoinMoin
is the whole world going to be using
wikis
instead of the proprietary dinosaurs like
Lotus Notes?"
I can only speak for myself, but I work at a startup, and we use a Wiki everyday. Since we've got no IT department (yet), we have outsourced the Wiki to somebody like SocialText and it works great.
One word of caution, though: If you value your Wiki information anything (and you should, often it's a big value of your company), make sure that you make backups to some machines not in the hand of the provider regularly: a provider might go out of business, in which case you don't want to loose all your data.
And even more importantly: Make sure you choose a provider that supports an open standard, where you can find another provider to switch over just in case.
We considered many different wikis, but we found only one standard to be already so big that it's very likely that it will still be there in 5 years - and that the mediawiki standard, of wikipedia fame.
Instiki is by far the easiest wiki to setup and configure that I've tried. It would only take you a few minutes to try it out. It's especially easy to install on OSX and after doing so it will show up on your toolbar. And it has pdf and TeX output.
The whole idea of Wiki is based on eastern religion concepts. Personally I find that a little unsettling.
What?!! I hope this is a joke.
I've heard Ward Cunningham give a talk on how he came up with Wikis and it didn't have anything to do with Hinduism or Buddhism, or any other eastern religion that I am aware of. As I recall the inspiration was Apple's Hypercard - he wanted something like that for the web. He got the name wiki from the name on he Hawaiian bus/taxis which are called 'wiki-wiki' which apparently means 'fast'.
So I suppose if Hawaii is a bastian of 'Eastern Religion' then there could be some slight connection, but your reason for not liking wikis is bizarre.
I second this wholeheartedly. It can't be emphasized enough that the default style is so easy to read that people will actually use it. We've had a tough time getting people to maintain our internal twiki installation because the default style makes it unreadable. It doesn't help that the tagging language sucks too. MediaWiki is much better in both respects. I'd like to see it support different database back ends, though.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Notes has had three - count 'em, 3 - major releases since that stuff was put up there, and many, if not all of the points it makes have been addressed. Notes is still one of the best platforms around for collaboration, for development of ad-hoc applications involving sharing information among teams and for publishing to the web. Notes/Domino continues to have just as much market share as Outlook/Exchange - and in fact you can even use Outlook as a client to a Domino back-end server.
Also, it continues to evolve - the next release, number 7, is in beta now. Customers' investment in applications developed under previous releases is preserved as well as ever (not something Microsoft can claim to do), and there's a roadmap that takes it towards a bright new future in the shape of the IBM Workplace.
You're wrong. A bit.
While you are correct that Lotus Notes provides scheduling, contacts and mail, and acts as a development (and production) platform for forms and workflow, it is also a gigantic 'database'.
My employer uses Notes for everything you mentioned, plus storing and relating project and business documents.
Domino (the server engine behind Lotus Notes) can 'webify' Notes documents, and since Notes documents can be linked one-to-another, the links become hyperlinks viewable in a web browser.
Think of Notes and Domino in the same relationship as IE and Apache. Notes provides the presentation front end, and Domino provides the data and relationship backend. In this case, Notes (Domino) documents become documents in their own right, served up as pages of information to a Notes client or web browser.
The drawback to Notes/Domino is the tight control that this coupling requires. We've found that there are too many unknowns and roadblocks to use Notes/Domino as a method of widely distributing information that needs to be maintained by those other than the authors. An author needs to know that a Domino database exists, then s/he needs to gain permission to access that database, and further permission to add data to the database. A reader needs to know that the database exists, and needs to gain permission to access the database, and further permission to read the database. That's a lot of control that interferes with the flow of information. Frequently, the reader needs to become an editor or author, in order to correct mistakes in the document, or add more information. This means more administrivia to conquer, just to correct an error.
This is where a Wiki has it's advantage. It can be built and configured in such a way as to provide the audit trail that corporations need, and even to impose editor/author restrictions based on authenticated userid, but doesn't carry the administrative or implementation weight of Domino and Notes.
So that's the basis of the comparison. We use Notes as a very restricted Wiki.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
There are wiki's that deal with this. We use JSPWiki on our intranet; it is a std. servlet webapp. The next version should support authorization, but even without it: I put the webapp behind a mandatory browser client certificate authentication (you can only access it through https, and everyone on the intranet has a certificate). Then with a one-line modification the Edit.jsp is only accessible to people that have a certain role (i.e. a small group of people responsible for the content), but everyone can read.
Versions are tracked in RCS, so any mistakes can be reversed. Also the client IP addresses are logged, and internally it is known who has which IP address. So any of your questions can be answered satisfactorily.
Also it has templates to apply some corporate style. Your mission critical internal product/project, in a large bank, uses it for all important documentation.
What other kinds of metadata do you have in mind?
Theoretically, wikis are best used when everyone has a different piece of the pie and you're trying to put it all together. I know something about implementing module X; maybe another department knows something about implementing module Y; now we have to get X to talk to Y, here's what we know about both. It's meant to be a common repository, best used for things that change in a hurry. ("hurry" is entirely subjective -- three times a week might be fast)
A message board works for this purpose, except it's chronological, which has its advantages and disadvantages. A regular website is too static and would be messier than a wiki.
Of course, you can get creative with wikis... so far I'm trying to introduce it as an open-ended creative game, and a community journal that's admin-monitored.
The wikipedia doesn't necessarily change all that much, but it benefits from all internet users being theoretically able to add their knowledge into the repository.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!