I recently had a conversation with Ray King, who’s very involved with the wiki world including the RecentChanges blog, ICANN Wiki and the upcoming RecentChangesCamp. I was telling him about our vision for delivering an Enterprise Wiki suitable for use by Fortune 500 business customers. He came back to me with a few questions about how we are different from the many open source wikis available. And he also wanted to know what made our solution uniquely suited to corporate use. I gave him a fairly brief answer that outlined my experience with corporate customers what I felt was unique about our approach. This conversation got me thinking about documenting in a little more detail what our approach is, how our thinking has evolved, and where we are going.
To begin with in this article I thought I would outline some of the original ideas that went into the design of the CustomerVision “Business Wiki”.
When we first thought about the design of our wiki we decided to build a product that sticks to the core concepts that have made wikis so effective while still creating a product that is easy for people who are not tech savvy and who may not even be early adopters.
Wiki concepts that we felt had to be there
- One click editing - It may seem like stating the obvious but we felt this is the starting point for a wiki.
- Roll back - It turns out making it easy to role back the small number of mistakes or disagreements is a more productive model then putting up a bunch of gates and fences to stop anyone from the possibility of doing something wrong.
- Recent changes – This is a concept that isn’t always obvious to new users but it’s very important once a wiki develops an active user base. Recent Changes makes it easy to instantly see what’s happening and who’s active.
- Discussion – This is another concept that’s much more important than most people initially understand. The discussion area and the "give and take" that happens around an article isn’t just a supporting feature – it’s critical to the value of the wiki. The discussion area often drives some of the most valuable learning and communication.
Concepts that needed a fresh approach for our customers
- Wiki script vs. WSIWYG editor – I know that wiki script is simple and clean and very convenient once a person gets the hang of it but we felt a good WSIWYG editor was still the fastest way to let non-technical users build and edit content. This approach has been taken by a number of wiki vendors so it should not be a huge surprise.
- Wiki linking vs. List view, Category menu and Search – This is probably our biggest departure from a conventional approach to wikis. Many people consider wiki style linking to be just as important as one click editing when it comes to core wiki ideas. But it’s my feeling that wiki linking and naming issues can cause both short term and long term complexity that's challenging for non-technical users. Many of the initial users of wikis were software developers and they're very familiar with the concepts behind naming and creating relationships. These ideas are obviously very flexible and powerful but they can also be very complex if you don’t already have that mindset. At CustomerVision we took an approach allows someone to create a page or article then place that page based on its category. We also make search and navigation easy and intuitive so that pages can be organized, found, browsed and re-organized without the conceptual overhead of page naming and page relationship building. This is an area were we may end up supporting both approaches. We’ve been very happy with the results of our Category, List View and Search driven approach but that would not exclude providing traditional wiki naming and linking as well.
Features we felt should be added
- Simple content management – Provide the tools so that an end user can build a wiki that looks like a standard, attractive website.
- Simple workflow – Sometimes workflow is a "must have" for a corporate environment. CustomerVision provides simple workflow for those that need it without adding any complexity to the wiki performance. The workflow can be activated on a full or limited basis but if you don’t need it it’s invisible.
- Templates and forms – This is another addition that’s critical for the customers that need it and invisible to those who don’t need it. If you have a standard article type or stub that can form the basis for a new page then you can save that as a page template. This could be a standard format for a competitive review or for documenting a best practice. The form builder feature makes it easy for someone to create a form to get specific structured feedback. We also provide the ability to manage and route that feedback and to author and send responses when appropriate.
- Granular permissions – If the permission system is turned on users can create anything from a simple, two tiered Visitor vs. Member permission system to a complex hierarchical arrangement that supports groups like Employees, Field, Partners and Customers, including subgroups beneath the major groups.
- Advanced options for articles – This includes things like a Summary Field for List View, Related Links and Page Expiration.
The final element that needs to be mentioned is building an organization that’s designed to sell to and support large corporate customers. This part is easy to overlook but mainstream business adoption will not happen until large corporate customers can work with an organization that also provides the sales process, training, support and service required to ensure successful adoption.
From my knowledge of the marketplace CustomerVision, along with Socialtext and Atlassian are fairly unique in having a specific focus on providing the features, training and service infrastructure to implement wikis for use by business customers in a Fortune 500 company. And I’m talking about the kind of implementation that’s used by a full business unit made up of non-technical sales and service people. While there may be a number of Fortune 500 companies with active wikis in IT and development groups, the requirements for successful implementation in a business unit are very different.
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