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At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise.  The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list.  In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0. This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise.  Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube.  And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.    Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure.  This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones.  Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries.  Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.

it doesn't help us understand if Web 2.0 concepts like crowdsourcing actually work well in the enterprise.  For one thing, instead of recruiting people who have previously had no relationship with you and cost-effectively aggregating their time together to create large levels of new output, employers have a zero-sum game with Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

the best that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications like blogs and wikis can do it increase the productivity of existing business processes by improving efficiency as well as allowing them to self-improve through emergent structure and behavior.

It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

Best Practices Learn how the pros achieve higher productivity through enhanced collaboration. Attention Management - Reduce time wasted in the Inbox. CC to Wiki - Get around the curse of Reply-to-All. Collaborating on a non wiki page using a wiki page - Use the attachment feature to collaborate on presentation files, etc. Designing Spaces - Key considerations for creating new spaces. Developing a Public Blogging Strategy Distributed Document Review Gardening and Wiki gardening tips Index Pages - create starting points for navigation around topics of interest. Lightning Editing - how to co-edit a document with a collaborator Securing buy-in - getting others to shift perspectives on wikis Sparking participation at events Using the workspace as a document repository

Best Practices Learn how the pros achieve higher productivity through enhanced collaboration > . > Attention Management > - Reduce time wasted in the Inbox CC to Wiki > - Get around the curse of Reply-to-All. > Collaborating on a non wiki page using a wiki page > - Use the attachment feature to collaborate on presentation files, etc. > Designing Spaces > - Key considerations for creating new spaces. > Developing a Public Blogging Strategy > Distributed Document Review > Gardening > and > Wiki gardening tips > Index Pages > - create starting points for navigation around topics of interest. > Lightning Editing > - how to co-edit a document with a collaborator > Securing buy-in > - getting others to shift perspectives on wikis > Sparking participation at events > Using the workspace as a document repository > Doing a demo Create tagging structures - Develop a core list of tags for your wiki Wiki Structure - Create a page which outlines important elements of the wiki Stop creating Word documents - The first rule of integrating wikis effectively See also Bonnes Pratiques for a chart of best practices and French translations.

Corporate Wikis reviewed: Confluence, JotSpot, WetPaint, Socialtext by Troy Angrignon on Mon 10 Jul 2006 06:30 AM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis") Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles." It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.

Confluence is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. Adding, sharing and finding content has never been easier. These benefits come with all the additional features needed to make it a part of your business: Enterprise security Simple installation and management Attractive, user-friendly WYSIWYG interface Powerful tools for structuring and searching your wiki Professional features such as PDF export and automated refactoring An open API for extension and integration

There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools' usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.

These key users should: be open to trying new software be influential amongst their peers, thus able to help promulgate usage have the support of their managers Users who are potential evangelists should be identified at every level of management, not just amongst the higher echelons, or amongst the workforce.

3. Convert key users into evangelists Training in the form of short informal sessions (face-to-face or online) and ongoing on-demand support are the basics for encouraging adoption. Too much training or too formal a setting will put users off, and is usually unnecessary.

What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical - but in favor of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer? No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. > As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn.

The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity.