Jul 162008
 

The idea of wikis, the whole concept of col­lab­or­at­ive author­ing, is so enti­cing that it seems like it should be the default (at least if you don’t need more struc­tured markup behind it), even in the enter­prise. At least, that’s what I thought some years ago. People still like to send around office doc­u­ments with revi­sion mark­ing turned on, how­ever, rather than fully embrace the Brave New World. 

I tweeted that one prob­lem is likely the off­line issues (can­’t read the doc­u­ment on the air­plane unless I’ve saved a copy first); Edd added the “lost doc­u­ment” prob­lem where you can eas­ily lose a doc­u­ment when someone deletes the link to it, and you nev­er find it again. Spam, as Norm poin­ted out, is anoth­er issue on the inter­net, though it should­n’t be on the intranet.

And then there’s the issue of wiki markup, which some people detest. One pro­ject I’m work­ing on for Sun is using Medi­aWiki, for which you can export a doc­u­ment from Open­Of­fice, so that helps with at least get­ting the first draft of the doc­u­ment into the sys­tem. There’s still the update prob­lem; I gath­er that is slated for a future release of the wiki pub­lish­er exten­sion. When that works, I hope it will make it easi­er to talk cer­tain mem­bers of my team at Sun into using the sys­tem will­ingly <grin>.

/* ]]> */