Corporate wiki deployment pitfalls

This is actually a repost (and remake from a bit of knowledge learned from the comments on the original blog post and throughout the deployment of yet another corporate wiki) of something I wrote on Safira’s wiki (you can find the link on the side bar), it’s more of an experiment to post it here as well…

So how do we go about to implement a corporate wiki?

ok, let’s brain storm a bit here…

First and far most Mediawiki has some serious input problems. It somehow resembles the way you input stuff on Latex, but without the permanent brain damage, It drives less tech-savvy users away and a wiki should be able to be edited by everyone, not just the people who are inclined to learn it’s Dante-like markup language.

To-Do: install a proper wysiwyg on your wiki. TinyMCE and fckeditor are good choices. As a simple workaround (but not nearly as good as the previously mentioned) you have a very cool greasemonkey script you can painlessly install called wiked.

And if you don’t? well… people will still edit it, they won’t like it, but they will. Commitment will be slow and painful. Reminiscent of the “whippings will continue until moral improves” motto.

Then there’s the desert. We are used to waltz into wikipedia or KDE TechBase and have the wiki populated with articles, it thrives with an active community, discussions and trolls…your corporate wiki is as fruitful as a 70 year old lady with the hots.

To-Do: small task force to populate the wiki before the whole team/corporation/client even has a glimpse of it.

And if you don’t? be ready to answear “what for?” questions, low level of commits (and commitment) and desertion from the intended end user. And if you are planning a wiki for a team that already has fine documentation, you can rest assured your team will continue to use that documentation (because it’s there!) and be spiffy about the wiki.

Limbo syndrome. So we have wonderful documentation (gotta love those templates!) and we have over 50 task procedures, niched in a fetal position in those documents. And then there’s a wiki…it’s got 15 of those documents, and the new ones someone added to the wiki but didn’t bother to write the doc for it…(figures, you’ve been pushing the wiki pretty hard, right?) information is scattered, some are up-to-date on the wiki, some on the documentation, some doesn’t exist but should…damn.

To-Do: several ways to go about this: you can use the task force to migrate every single document to the wiki, churn on the documentation and go full blown wiki on everybody. it’s do-able. You can try and maintain both silos of information until you are ready to yourself commit to the wiki (I strongly advise you to have this well though out and planned. if you are feeling ground…well…don’t! wikis are about first impressions and you never have a second go at those.) Make a decision and stick with it…it’s either go or no go…there’s no middle ground.

And if you don’t? imagine if the 10 commandments were scattered around….hyea, that’s the deal. “what do you mean I can’t covet the other guy’s wife??? the version I checked doesn’t mention any of that!”

Ongoing task: keeping your user based interested. Because a wiki without continuity is simply casted away into oblivion.

To-Do: make another blog post about it.

And If I Don’t: I’m a wanker.

This is a very shy attempt to some common pitfalls in the bootstraping process of deployment of corporate wiki. Feel free to comment and add your experiences. I hope to eventually create a page for the subject alone, a silo of all things “corporate wiki”.

 

when all you have is a hammer…

How to effectively kill the online music business.

A reminder to Apple on how not to do things

Forcing churn.

How to clearly tell your customers you’re not trust worthy

How some things never change.

How to tell your paying customers they are suckers.

How to hammer a big nail on the DRM coffin

 

All possible titles to an article on Ars Technica (and in al honestly, all better then the one chosen)

linky: http://smallr.net/1354

 

 

eth-safe

So it’s all over my rss feeds that Jon Miller (the same bloke who hacked the iphone) managed to hack a macbook air at the CanSecWest security conference (oh, and pardon my use of the term “hacking” and not “cracking“, but i’ve been around the block for a wile and to me crackers are tasteless cookies, the media can paint whatever picture they want, I was there).

The interesting bit (at least to me) about all this is that the first day of the competition was solely network based attacks, wile after the second day the attackers could ask the organizers to do some actions as a regular user would (open emails, webpages, launch apps). The Air, Vista and Ubuntu boxes all survived the attacks done over the network, it was only on the following part of the competition that the hackers had any success…

So the spin on this is that a computer out of the box (whatever flavor that might be) has some real level of security even with default configurations. The fact that social engineering and phishing are much more prone to render your computer hostage is in fact the line in the sand that signals the beginning of the much harder task of making users security aware. Stop blaming the OS’s and applications and start pointing fingers at the users.

 

I want (love) sandy

Meet Sandy. Sandy is your personal assistant.

You just send her an email in plain English stating what you want and she keeps track of stuff for you, sending you and email back whenever some appointment is creeping up in the horizon and a nifty email in the morning with your daily appointments.

So if I send Sandy an email saying “Remind me to attend Shift, october 15-17″ I’ll be getting and email, close to the event, giving me a head’s up about it.

Sandy can keep notes, contacts, bookmarks, lists and notes for you. She can also keep track of reoccurring events (because she understands tags, and anything tagged with @weekly, for example is a weekly event you only have to mail her once about for her to keep track of it)

Sandy can skim through your emails and try to figure out what event you are trying to schedule, so you can even just get her on cc. I play it safe and add something like “Sandy, remind me to do this at <date>/<time>” to the email’s body. she’ll send an email confirming the appointment if you wish (@reply tag)

She also provides a personal rss feed with your calendar, a Twitter account to keep track of things and if you live in the US there’s a good chance she can send you an SMS too.

Some things are just too brilliant not to blog about them.

 

MultiTouch

Not the first time I mention this.

I’m now the proud owner of a Macbook Pro (as some of you might have followed in my twittering) , and although there isn’t a stellar difference from the old version of it the multi touch is…well…a nice touch.

So now that the technology Apple sought by acquiring Fingerworks (or their technology) is fully imbedded into the laptop’s trackpad, when are we getting all the power user features Fingerworks users were so keen on?

I do like the scroll and the back and forth gestures and the two finger right click, however, I want the copy, the move and all of that. Because it’s all application dependent now, and I’d really like to see it shine. (should I ask for a more efficient file manager for OS X, wile I’m at it? lol)

Apple knows best about usability, I would never argue with that, I have a feeling however that for newbie’s sake those features will never be enabled. Thus…will there be  a 3rd party developer picking up the ball? I’d appriciate it. :D 

 

told ya’

See you in two weeks.

 

oh noes, no more lemmings!

okay, Microsoft seems to be getting social and keen on interoperability. Now if Apple releases a new MacBook Pro, I swear to God that I will refuse to read RSS feeds for two weeks, I will not click on blogs and I’ll keep away from any social networks…

… with the obvious exception of Adult Friend Finder.

(mental note on Microsoft: buy very warm coat and leave very specific instructions for it to be in the casket when I go.)

 

My kind of “social” network

http://isolatr.com/

Thanks for the tip mate

 

Timekeeping - Analog to digital and back

About a year ago I bought my all in one mobile device, gift wrapped as a brilliant catch on ebay, I used it extensively for the duration of the year (no, it wasn’t a Steve Pavlina experiment, but maybe I should take up his method, though).

I had a fully analog way of time keeping that during that time, was focusing heavily on David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner. Getting the PDA made me go 100% digital because…well…all the perks of digital were there: at hand, everywhere I was and since I’ve alway been liberal with GRPS traffic always “update-able”, having the PDA also made up for my utter lack of memory for certain items (birthdays, addresses, locations, name of someone’s wife, etc) it was right there all accessible and at that it never failed me.

First headache was really all the syncing going on…I have two exchange accounts (one for Safira and one for Sonaecom) and since I feel strange committing my personal life to any of those calendars, I also had a google calendar. Activesync is as hopeless as it’s always been and bluetooth connection with activesync just makes it even more unbearable.

So I was juggling calendars, fighting activesync on daily basis and doing reboots so that bluetooth would work with it this time around… In all honesty it’s just so broken with annoyances that I find it hard to understand why anyone would subject him or herself to that sort of aggravation. (maybe other people just “sync”, maybe the cradle is a safer bet then bluetooth (it really is!) maybe they just don’t care that much about the “unresolved sync issues” and that there’s no clear way of fixing them. But me? I’m too anal to have unresolved sync issues).

As of late I found myself missing two meetings, not being informed about stuff happening in my own life…and the last time that sort of stuff happened was…well…never! checking calendars the events were there, they were just not on the pda…AGAIN! so I decided to take it like a shot of lousy scotch…”I’ll lose a day working on this, but I’ll fix it…” so I decided to use two pieces of software: One for syncing both my outlook accounts with google calendar and then google calendar with the PDA, leaving activesych with the heafty (!) task of syncing just the address book and whichever emails are in the mailbox in that point in time (I admit, in the past year I only checked for a work related email on the PDA once, so…not that important).

Oggsync will sync the outlook calendars with google calendar. The free version will sync only the 3 days around the current day (which didn’t bother me for testing purposes), they ask for 30 bucks a year in exchange for the pro version that syncs more days and can flag events as private among other niceties… 30 bucks a year is a sheer rip off, but hey…

Gmobilesync will sync my wm5 device with google calendar (which thanks to oggsync now has two extra calendars with both outlook accounts).

it’s all good. My pda has all the events, everything is fine.

And today this happened:

I downloaded the latest version of David’s ETP and started adding stuff. And finally, again, I feel I have control over my schedule. It’s a strange feeling, that me of all people (the early adopter, the guy who fearlessly tries out stuff and sticks to digital every time the chance arises) felt much more in control with some printed out PDF’s and my dreadful handwriting then with it’s digital counterpart.

Going back to paper has at least one advantage: I’m not blindly trusting that stuff is synced…actually, there’s no syncing at all, just a few sheets of paper that keep track of my day.

Google calendar is still a big repository of stuff…but there’s really just this big block identifying “working hours”, the ETP is really where I go down to the little parts that encompass that big block. So Google Calendar gives me a macro vision of my day, ETP gives me some more verbosity, that I can scratch, draw, jot down and mess as much as I see fit.

ETP feels like home, I like home…it’s safe there.

 

ha!

- You can’t argue against facts!

- Right, that’s what marketing campaigns are for.