On his blog Musings of a Software Development Manager, Ed Gibbs writes about his experience as a Wiki Champion in a software development group. He points out that Confluence was brought in, “at the urging of a motivated tech lead� and when that person moved to a different job he became the wiki champion. He says,
“Turns out I probably am responsible for 25-33% of the current activity on our wiki. I dump everything there from velocity logs on projects to tips on troubleshooting build problems. I’m still trying to gently drive adoption since I want to avoid the “All wiki all the time� pattern.�
Putting content like logs and troubleshooting tips on the wiki is a good way to make it into a Magnet, and for a group of developers I’d also suggest using it as a place to share commonly used code samples.
In a blog comments conversation, Ed mentioned that he’s working to spread wiki use beyond just the developers, and is seeing some success, but is also finding that some people aren’t yet comfortable with the idea of directly editing wiki pages. This is another example of the residual effect of the non-collaborative software people have been used to using for so long - the open nature of the wiki just takes some getting used to.
2 Comment(s)
I have had 2 Wiki deployments completely nixed and one that I think is being slowed immensely because of existing Microsoft Sharepoint installations.
The 2 Wiki deployments that were shut down completely after IT in large organizations went to management and complained of redundancy. They claimed that their costly Microsoft Sharepoint installation was a Wiki and people were creating redundant system. Users felt differently they didn't feel at all in control over changes on the Sharepoint installation.
The 3rd group, their Wiki adoption has been greatly slowed by a prior bad experience with Sharepoint which I think has left most people very scared of the Wiki and what it will or won't do.
Any other experiences of Sharepoint Shock? Also these were all in development groups.
By Kin Lane at May 31, 2007 11:55 AM
I'm also trying to replace Sharepoint with Confluence. Many of our groups want something more powerful than Sharepoint (though some don't and it doesn't cost us anything to keep Sharepoint around). Our problem is that folks do not want to give up certain features of Sharepoint. The main one is being able to use WebDAV to directly add and edit Office documents as MHT files to a document store. This IS possible with Confluence (with the WebDAV plugin) - but it sure is clumsy. Frankly, Confluence could really do more to help folks that want to migrate from Sharepoint by making editin via Office apps a more streamlined process.
By Ray Johnson at June 13, 2007 4:47 AM