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Ask Slashdot: Multimedia-Based Wiki For Learning and Business Procedures?
kyle11 writes I'm scratching my head at how to develop a decent wiki for a large organization I work in. We support multiple technologies, across multiple locations, and have ways of doing things that become exponentially convoluted. I give IT training to many of these users for a particular technology, and other people do for other stuff as well. Now, I hate wikis because everyone who did one before failed and gave them a bad name. If it starts wrong, it is doomed to failure and irrelevance.
What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with YouTube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like, "Welcome to working in this department. Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job." I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to YouTube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing because its' a pain in the butt.
My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on one virtual machine if at all possible. I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?
What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with YouTube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like, "Welcome to working in this department. Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job." I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to YouTube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing because its' a pain in the butt.
My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on one virtual machine if at all possible. I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?
First one to suggest SharePoint gets shot
The problem with any system is content. You said all Wikis have failed so far, have you figured out why? The answer may not be in the format itself but rather the content it provides. If you can't get the content right, and most importantly relevant, then it doesn't matter what technology you will use.
My suggestion is before you even consider doing this you need buyin from the various departments you support to help create content. If you launch with little you will be irrelevant. If you put it off long enough to fill it and make it useful then you may have a chance of surviving.
"Build it and they will come" does not apply here.
Hi
I am not sure a Wiki is the right thing for you: you are effectively looking for a training / knowledge sharing platorm with strong video focus.
A the strength of a Wiki to me is its editability, which I am not sure you'll need...
So you might want to consider looking a bit around for video based trainnig platforms?
Anyway, if clollaboration and editing (rather than just consumption and dissemination) is of interest: my company is using Atlassian's Confluence which is easy to use and quite powerful at the same time, with a number of amazing plug-ins (diagramming tools such as Gliffy or Lucidchart, links to JIRA, etc)
I can highly recommend it as Wiki to support team collaboration.
I am not sure how this works with your requirement regarding video though...
https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
...I suspect Confluence together with plugin CYO Create-Your-Own would do the job.
;-).
As an extra bonus, it might, just might, allow your office documents to be reasonably integrated within the wiki (fi. search box).
Although, I try to stray away of not open source software, I had overall good experience with Confluence a couple years ago.
Also, Apache Software Foundation has also been relying on it for years (after all, that's how they got hacked
Let us know how it would or would not fit your bill.
You don't need a wiki to explain the horrendously convoluted business practices. You need to get the horrendously convoluted business practices simplified.
I know you're in the IT department not senior management, but that does put you in something of a position of strength if you can quantify the time being wasted by the current procedures and explain how a simpler procedure could work and how much money it could save. Just be careful, you may be writing your own job description as the lucky (?!) one who gets to implement all the simplification!
I'm not sure using a wiki is really the answer but if you insist then try Dokuwiki. It doesn't get much simpler on the end user side when it comes to using a Wiki.
https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuw...
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
A tutorial is not the same as a reference manual. A wiki is the latter.
If you want to teach somebody a bunch of skills you need to print out a worksheet with the skills listed in a step-by-step order with spaces for review by supervisor. (This works for audit as well). The progress (hopefully backed with encouragement from the superviso, drives the long slog.)
Different people learn in different ways. For some watching is enough but others need to 'do'. There's a lot of work been done on the various ways. Videos are unlikely to be the whole answer. In fact they may not be suitable at all if they concentrate on click-this-click-that. The task is in the person's head and they may need careful preparation of information or mental triggers to check for odd circumstances. So the task is not 'clicking at the orders screen' but 'taking an order and making sure nothing can go wrong(using the orders screen)'.
I totally agree with what was said above about Confluence: Confluence is a great option for a Wiki. https://www.atlassian.com/soft... And it does support different media types. Whether you actually need a Wiki is a different questions :)
The problem with any system is content.
Bingo.
Use static HTML, CSS, the F4Player and see the lectures catch on. Once you've got content, choose/buid you system based on that. That might even be Wordpress or Joomla or something.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If time is important in terms of preparation and especially maintenance, then Adobe's Robohelp product may be worth considering, probably with Captivate for producing the video material. It has its own set of wiki templates, plays well with Sharepoint, is HTML5 ready in its current version (11), and allows for production of varying formats within the same file or project. Just be ready to tweak the code for the templates.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
Try Atlassian Confluence
https://www.atlassian.com/soft...
It is not free (as in beer) but IMO it meets your needs. This is the most user friendly wiki software I know and has roles for knowledge base system and also means to attach files (f.e. videos). You can put in few macros that will automagically embed attached videos in web player.
Read on here:
https://confluence.atlassian.c...
we started 6/7 years ago with a wiki and 5 years ago moved to a drupal instalation with loads of modules.
it can handle course materials in all common formats: documents, audio, video, etc.
Surprised nobody has mentioned it already.
There's plenty around. Here's one: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/...
Ignore that advice about Confluence. That product is HARD to use imo. Mediawiki is way better.
BTW - New version of Mediawiki have a rich text editor built in. You probably want to turn that on.
The number one problem with wikis and all other systems that try to 'store' employee's knowledge is that it requires people to make their knowledge explicit.
In your daily life and in your work, many things (if not almost everything) you do is based on implicit knowledge. You implicitly know how stuff is done, but to describe the steps you take and the thought processes you have, takes a lot of time and energy of your employees/colleagues. And then of course there's also the issue of keeping the knowledge up-to-date. Adding it is one thing, but keeping it fresh and ensuring people update the explicit knowledge in the wiki, also takes time and energy. Especially in IT, because the way things work changes relatively often.
And last but not least, people are often not willing to make their knowledge explicit, because their implicit knowledge makes them valuable as an employee. Overall you could say that the intrinsic motivation for people to make their knowledge explicit is very low.
Many scientific papers have been written on this subject. I suggest you try to find some answers there, although they may not be easy to find.
We had a similar use case at my company, although the amount of actual video was very low. One thing you should consider is permissions. If you need permissions at all then a wiki is not for you, wiki's are not designed with fine grained viewing/editing permissions.
We've had a great success with an internal Drupal CMS instead. Web developer to put the company style on it and put the first few articles in, quick training session on Drupal for managers to cascade down to their departments.
At work IT uses Onenote notebooks for documentation. I never tried it for video, but we've had good luck for it with text/images. No programming knowledge needed, adequate search, OCR/search of text in images. You can sync the content using a file share or Sharepoint, and probably WebDAV. I understand it's cost-free for Windows and Mac. You get a web interface if you use Sharepoint, but I don't care for it. If you're a primarily Windows/Office shop it might be worth testing.
Wikis let anybody add and edit data. That is there strength and their weakness. That might be good in some situations, but probably not with business policies and the like. In a business setting, maybe something like Wordpress would suit your needs better as you can imbed multimedia in it. If you have more advanced needs, then maybe Drupal would work.
Absolute nonsense. Moodle is for managing content and it happens to have an optional plug in to monitor viewers ('students') progress.
But as others have noted, it is not the platform that is the problem, it is getting and keeping fresh content that matters. Any platform with good content would work.
i wrote a video upload and playback system for a christian-based financial advice organisation that was uncomfortable with the idea of having youtube advertising messages in direct contravention of the advice that they were giving their clients.
the "normal" way to do what you are asking would be to simply have a plugin that allows you to specify the youtube URL, and it would be embedded... this is not very hard to do, and, if there is not something out there already, consider paying a programmer to do it. they should not take very long [of the order of days].
however... if, like the christian-based financial advise organisation that i had to create an entire video upload, storage and playback system for the use of youtube is completely inappropriate for your organisation (because the videos are to be kept confidential for example) then there really isn't anything out there (i looked) and you will need to write your own.
for this task you should allocate at least two to three months, if you have access to good programmers, bearing in mind that you will need both front-end developers as well as back-end server capable engineers. one of the problems to solve (in basically reinventing youtube) is that the videos need to be converted to several different formats in order to make it possible to play them back on multiple browser engines.
if this is the path you've chosen then i can help save you some time. but please think carefully about what it is that you need. as a number of other people have pointed out you've said "i need a wiki to store videos" when actually what you _should_ have said is "what's the best way to offer people in-house training videos" and qualified that potentially with a list of options such as "my budget is $X" and "my time is Y" and "my in-house skill-set is A B and C".
We are testing deploying Dozuki at work. It's the software used to create iFixit manuals and is built around Open Manual http://omanual.org./ Can't say if I would recommend it at this point but the Open Manual standard looks interesting.
"Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job"
Access request procedures change very fast and are tedious to contribute updates to.
Videos have a high friction to update. Out of date docmentation is worse than no documentation at all.
Wikis have a low friction to update. Even the new hire can fix things as they execute the procedures.
I don't know why people would use videos, but then I also think that videos are terrible learning tools. But then, maybe it's just me, there are some strong visual learners out there.
You don't want a Wiki, you want a Content Management System (CMS). I'd suggest Joomla. There are lots of extensions for delivering video.
I've been involved in many, many projects to share internal knowledge over the years. I had pretty much given up all hope on wiki technology until I got to the latest versions of Confluence, which strikes an excellent balance between flexibility, simplicity, and automation.
Doing the task you outlined (create multiple playlists of media files) could be done in a variety of ways: Create a "File List" page and upload your content, then create separate pages linking to them; create a page and attach the multimedia files, then use the Multimedia Widget to automatically create a gallery of them to playback; or, host the files on a shared disk and link to them from Confluence.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I'll see your Drupal and raise you one better: how about using Drupal/OpenAtrium?
You may recall the previous Presidential administration made headlines by replacing the Clinton administration's IBM/Lotus Notes Domino email/groupware servers with MicrosoftExchange (and presumably SharePoint also, but I'm not gonna go there).
The current Presidential administration of course had to ditch that Microsoft crap as fast as it possibly could. Obviously, continuing to use it would become a political and legal liability. They chose to use Drupal/OpenAtrium. Using OpenAtrium2 on Drupal 7, you too can enjoy a smartphone-enabled responsive intranet, with a minimum of development and budget.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a Drupal OpenAtrium developer (and am looking for my next project, so am available for private discussions). In fact at the same time it went public that The White House uses OpenAtrium for their project management and collaboration requirements, I delivered a similar collaborative project management intranet to NYSE Euronext. It was used by teams at the Amsterdam, Paris, and New York Exchanges while I was there. Before others also realized, I ascertained my assignment put my development efforts (and bug-tracking/feature requirements) in direct competition with Atlassian JIRA, so I took JIRA head-on. Just before Christmas a meeting was held, and I was told a Sr. VP at NYSE had decided my OpenAtrium development of a few weeks was superior and thus more desirable than JIRA, and I won(!) the competition. I was told then NYSE would use my OpenAtrium, and ditch JIRA, because my OpenAtrium Atrium development after only a few weeks could clearly beat JIRA requirement per requirement, while being much more user-friendly, and with a (dare I say) sexier GUI.
Alas, it was not to be (for me), and ultimately JIRA won, and I lost, and was soon out of a contract also. But still! I was a contender, dammit! All I got to work with was a bunch of Microsoft Office tools, Windows, and we were graced to also use FireFox. I delivered a Drupal application to NYSE overnight using my own VPS at Linode, with zero budget out of fear of job-loss. Previously, NYSE loved their 2-D spreadsheets and email, for project management. I requested early-on to be allowed to import their spreadsheets into a 3-D relational MySQL (drupal) database early on and was told "No". After several weeks passed, of no progress made by me to answer the report-requirements/questions posed of me by NYSE bean counters despite my best efforts with Microsoft Excel and %$#@! pivot tables, I asked my boss again, can I import the data into MySQL? I was then told yes, because that info was due weeks ago, was very late, and I was otherwise about to be fired. I worked all night and less than 24 hours later, all was imported into Drupal and I was able to report on and answer every question posed upon me. A week later, that Drupal database became a Drupal/IOpenAtrium intranet, and evolved into a very popular project management and collaborative tool. The #1 feature was: MULTITASKING. No longer did all my colleagues have to take turns updating the single spreadsheet, one at a time, with their totals at 5 o'clock, before they could go home! This was a huge hit from the staff. Meanwhile NY loved the spreadsheet import/export feature I implemented for them (HAD to have that to get approval). The Drupal (spreadsheet) sheetnode module is better (and sexier) than Google Docs IMHO. NYSE thought so too. For awhile there, I beat JIRA at NYSE using Opentrium, and I'm very proud of that.
FWIW, I have code for responsive video content-types about 85% finished, based upon the video.js open-source player.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Video is a format which perhaps will make it easier for content creators to quickly throw something up onto he web. Most of the time, however, that's just what it will be: throw up. Crafting a quality video requires a significant time investment as well as skills and tools that your content creators likely will not have. Furthermore, for the end user (an employee at your company that requires training) video will be less than ideal because it is a poor format for learning and reference: - you cannot consume video at your own pace, only at the pace of the creator - you cannot scan the contents - you cannot easily jump to a particular section of content - referring back to the video to find information is an infuriating chore I would suggest that your desire to make the training wiki video-based is misguided. A text based step by step with diagrams and bulleted lists is a cleaner, better, more user-friendly format for training and documentation.
Bang! you're dead!
My vote is for Drupal. Wordpress & Joomla don't seem to be flexible enough for these kinds of deployments (at least for us). We built a procedure/policy/asset/access/resource tracking website with Drupal. It handles procedural documentation, policies, equipment assignments, loaner device checkout program, software license assignments, and much more. We dropped in an LDAP module, and life was good. We used to run a wiki too, but the requirement to hand code special markup was a turn-off for most of our users, so we ditched it.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Not a wiki, but it gives you that "internal YouTube" kinda thing: www.vimp.com
Even has a freebie community edition.
Using that logic, just because you know how to sling an insult, doesn't mean you should.
Requiem for the American Dream
Surprised that nobody's mentioned http://mediagoblin.org/ yet. Probably better than Youtube for a video oriented knowledge base. BTW, I don't recommend LMS'/VLE's. They're designed for controlled, linear progressions through courses and so are usually a nightmare to find random stuff on, i.e. often no global search, no filtering, no tagging, and no categories. You could always use an LMS/VLE and have MediaGoblin as a sitewide repository; best of both worlds!
I maintain my company's knowledge systems. Multimedia videos have several problems:
- They are not accessible to the hard of hearing or the vision-impaired.You may be breaking the law unless you invest the effort to caption every single video.
- They are hard to search. Unless you create transcripts/captions or extensively meta-tag the videos it's really hard to find specific content.
- They are not easy to update. Generally you have to reshoot and re-edit the entire video.
- They take a lot of time and effort. Generally you can produce a text-based delivery that covers more knowledge in better detail in the same time it takes you to make a video.
I've seen several efforts to "video all the things". All have failed. Corporate videos are good for one thing - delivering "talking head" messages from management. After six months you can quietly drop them from your intranet and nobody notices.
It's not free, it's a pain to administer and many really helpful and good 3rd party add-ons aren't free either (heck, some can be more expensive than the thing itself!). But at the end of the day it can do pretty much anything you could possibly wish for while being simple enough to USE that anyone who used Word before could start out quickly.