Floss (Free/Libre Open Source Software) is a wiki host for open source software documentation. Books on Floss are like Drupal collaborative books. They allow individuals to create chapters to add to a book, and edit existing chapters. Users can then print or export a PDF of the entire book. What Floss offers that is different is the ability to remix books by selecting individual chapters, dragging them into a new book, changing titles, and saving off their new creation. It's a nice idea for users that only want to select parts of a book to save, or insert chapters from other books to create an entirely different book to save. How's that for flexibility?
There is a group of people getting around the idea of having a Universal Edit Button in browser bars to indicate when a page is editable. The green pencil icon is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available.
For now, you would have to install a Firefox extension that makes this icon appear in your address bar when a site provides the link tag with type "application/x-wiki" as follows:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/x-wiki" title="Edit" href="[PUT YOUR EDIT URL HERE]" />
Seems like a very good idea to me. I've grown accustomed to using the RSS links in the browser bar rather than searching all over the page for it. Browsers have done a good job of allowing users to leverage this link tag and easily subscribe to RSS feeds. I don't see any reason why wikis and other editable CMS shouldn't provide this as well.
InformationWeek reports on Wachovia's push to introduce social software into the enterprise.
Beyond connecting employees around the world, Wachovia's collaborative environment is designed to attract younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. "Business in general has a real challenge engaging Generation Y," said Fields. "They're coming to us with high enthusiasm but encountering arcane tools and bureaucracies," he said, adding that many young workers' engagement levels "fall off the table" after about a year on the job. "They are leaving Fortune 100 companies," he said.
The company started by piloting wikis that represented "non-threatening use cases," and are expanding out from there. They will be building their set of tools based on Sharepoint services.
As younger knowledge workers enter the workplace and see the cumbersome legacy tools, or lack of tools, provided by some enterprises, they will clamor for the services they already use on the Internet and bitch about the inadequacy of what they have. I know I did when I worked in a large corporation.
Starting around 2000, with IM and then moving on the wikis, and social bookmarking, I got our group to bypass IT to install AIM and Usemod, and built our own social bookmarking tools. We learned to get things done better, faster, and smarter. I never asked for permission. I just did my job the best way I could.
There's no reason young information workers should need to ask for these tools now. You'd better just have them or we'll look outside to get them. But if you want to address issues such as security, it's better to heed the rumble from the grassroots.
The realization within the really large corporations like Wachovia to accept the new paradigm of doing business openly within the enterprise is a sign that the idea has taken root, and we shouldn't need to describe or document the need any longer. The tools are mature enough for IT consider in terms of security and journaling functionalities. Enterprise social software is slowly following in the wake of acceptance of the Cluetrain, and the paradigm of open markets and transparent communications with businesses. The timing is right and the tools are tested.
If I have any say in the matter, I won't ever work for another large company again. It took a lot of effort in evangelizing, socializing, and implementing tools for more efficient communications and documentation processes. But should I ever find myself back in a large corporation some day in the future, I'd wager that some form of the social software I use today will be present in those companies.
Steward Mader provides suggestions for starting a wiki in the enterprise. His opening advice boils down to what I said in my enterprise blogging presentations a few years ago. To summarize:
- Go grassroots—start with processes you already do in other ways and migrate them to the wiki (meeting notes, documentation, etc.)
- Work with a small pilot team of doers
- Lead by example and then invite senior leadership to look and participate
Someone asked me the following question:
I'm considering using a wiki as a documentation tool for a collaboratively written project. The main functionally I need is a table-of-contents navigation, probably similar to how a document tree or outline format nests links under a multiple categories.
In response, I wrote up the following review of some of the Wiki and CMS options I've used and am familiar with. This isn't an exhaustive survey of the solutions out there, but my report of solutions I have experience using feel confident recommending. Other suggestions are welcome.
TOC of Single Page
When I left Bell Labs, we were using Twiki and were using the built in TOC variable for pages. Like Word Processing table of contents, this works by editing your page naturally using headings, and then inserting a %TOC% variable at the top of the page. The variable automatically generates a table of contents based on the headings you've used in the page. MediaWiki features a similar TOC variable.
TOC of Multiple Chapters and Pages
If you're looking to create a document that consists of a series of chapters and pages, like a traditional book, then you might be more interested in Drupal's Collaborative Book module. This module allows you to create books with chapters, and assign pages to chapters in the book. You work organically by creating pages and assigning the pages in a hierarchical book outline. The Drupal documentation itself is built as a series of books.
The administrative display for organizing a book is really quite good.
I was working with a client that wanted to basically take a printed publication and later move their editing process to a web-based application that allowed them to provde a companion ebook. The idea of a living document suited itself to using Drupal's book module. With the module, they can create a site organized in chapters as the printed book is, and also export or print the book as a single page PDF.
Register here to get the free TeamPage5 installer. About TeamPage5:
Traction® TeamPage5™ is a free version of Traction Software's award winning TeamPage™ Server product. TeamPage5 supports up to 5 projects (blog / wiki spaces) and 5 named user accounts with individually defined permissions and identities. Projects can also be opened to Visitors (e.g. you can open any space so that anyone on your intranet can read, edit, comment or post). Registration for TeamPage5 provides a personal account on our support server to download software updates, read customer and product FAQ's, and participate in Traction's customer Forum.
Traction® TeamPage5™ is simple to download, install and manage. TeamPage software can be deployed on your intranet, corporate DMZ or on the public internet using a computer that supports Java server software, see TeamPage System Requirements. TeamPage5 provides a free way to create a collaborative communication hub which can scale to meet your future needs. You can easily upgrade to TeamPage15 or TeamPage at any time.
Excellent news for enterprises and now even individuals who are ready to take their knowledge management work to the next level.
I've fallen in love with the wiki tools for Drupal. I've long wanted to abandon the PMWiki and Jot Wiki I've used over the years in favor of something that's utterly simple, integrates well with the set of tools I currently use, and works like a wiki should. The set of modules currently offered for Drupal finally lets me do this with the forward linking and MediaWiki syntax that I come to expect from a wiki.
To see how this all works in Drupal, you have to check out the demonstrations and simple documentation for using wiki_tools and the pearwiki_filter modules. Getting up and running will require a few steps to install the right modules and get everything configured—this isn't a single module plug and play task. That How To page gives you the recipe for configuring everything, including installing some nice experimental plugins like the section_edit module. I installed my wiki on a separate Drupal site rather than under my blog in order to keep things simple, but you shouldn't need to if you want all your content accessible in one place.
Try it out. While it lacks some of the more advanced features of Jot, e.g. date-related functionality like creating to dos, it's more than adequate for most note-taking wiki needs. For light project management activities, I might prefer something like Jot's PM module instead (or BaseCamp, but I'd prefer free over fee), but for now I'm trashing my wiki notes on Jot and using my own Drupal wiki instead.
InfoWorld has announced the 2007 Technology of the Year Awards for the applications they rated best and most innovative in each of 8 classes of information technology. Traction Software, who I began doing user experience consulting for last spring, won in the Data Management category for Best Enterprise Wiki.
Last year, Traction released version 3.7 of Traction TeamPage and Communicator, which introduced several very exciting new content management and theming enhancements and continued to focus on usability improvements. If you're in the market for an application that does enterprise collaboration tool the way you want to, you'll want to check out the Traction 3.7 feature set.
Congrats to all the recipients of the IW Technology of the Year Awards.
Baseline has a feature story exposing bits about How Google works and what we can learn from them. Most of the story focusses on the unique infrastructure Google has been building to support its expanding needs. But most interesting to me is the small bit that takes a lok Inside Google's Enterprise. The article refers to Page and Brin's pronouncement in their IPO that the company is not conventional and doesn't intend to become so. And this appears to be true judging by the way they run the company internally. They won't follow the pattern of what's been done to run businesses in the past if they can find a better way themselves.
This is exactly the attitude that has slowly been building up a revolution inside the ranks at enterprises large and small. Knowledge workers, fed up with the way things are have turned away from conventional software to manage they way the work in favor of better, simpler applications that get out of their way and let them get on with with it.
The article talks about how Google uses a simple system that manages project information using relatively unstructured email as the interface. The system mails employees every week asking what they worked on the week prior and what they plan to work on during the current week. The response is parsed, fed and indexed into a searchable system that is open to the enterprise so that anyone else can track other employees projects that they are interested in. They call it "living out loud".
What they're doing is creating an open system that matches an open knowledge sharing ecology. That openness allows for the "cross pollenation" of ideas. Even better, it provides opportunity for the one thing that is driving nearly every aspect of the innovative web today -- open conversation. They're creating a system that better ensures sustainability because it works with an existing, accepted process -- communicating through email. This removes barriers to use because email is easy. The unstructured nature of the format also means that it can evolve with the needs of the system on the back end. The computer works harder so that the knowledge worker can just dash off a note and get on with their work.
Wow, right? That's revolutionary thinking, and it's so simple on the user-facing end that you hardly have any excuse for not participating. And opportunists that exploit the system by mining and tracking with it will benefit from it immensely. This is the evolving face of knowledge management. The idea of telling the technology to get out of the way so we can do work is what's driving the enterprise blog and wiki revolution. We all need to publish, share and collaborate, but we want to do it as simply and effortlessly as possible. Google embodies that idea completely inside and out.
Just noticed this new wiki feature today. Broken in Safari at the moment. They must have been adding this as I was trying it, because when I added the link to the wiki on Lou and Peter's book page, the URL wasn't clickable initially. When I revisited the page a short while later, the link was clickable. Strange. Wonder how this will be abused.
I noticed the citations feature today as well. Don't know how long it's been there. These are the citations for Lou and Peter's IA for the WWW book
Talk about feature creep. Amazing how much stuff they're cramming into these pages. Peter pointed out to me that they removed the sidebars, a detail I actually didn't notice before he mentioned it.