Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/

We make pretty good use of Confluence at the office so it was interesting to read Frank Kelly’s take on wiki’s in the workplace.

To a certain extent I agree with his arguments. We’ve been using it as a storage repository for feature breakdowns, roadmaps and design reviews amongst many other things but it has been difficult to create (and maintain) meaningful information in an environment that essential boils down to a free-for-all (ie. “Do I create a new page for this? or Do I update an existing page to include this new information?). Basic navigation has sufficed to a certain extent but short of having to search for everything (tags and keywords) I’ll admit that it has been difficult to develop a consistent structure. At best we have focused on developing a few common spaces for content that otherwise has grown organically. With a goal of promoting authorship and ease of access to information, security around page (modifications included) is kept to a minimal. This has worked so far but is likely to be reviewed as overall wiki usage increases.

Fortunately Confluence allows us to fairly easily track ownership when changes are made to a wiki page. Templates would likely help out a bit structurally but we’ve yet to invest much time in that direction. A suggestion for anyone implementing a wiki in a small->medium sized organization would be to regularly sent out emails containing wiki modifications (just the links/sections that have been updated). Getting notices pushed to your inbox is infinitely nicer than having to regularly monitor selected pages of interest.

If you are looking for an enterprise wiki solution, I’d highly recommend Confluence. Despite the inherent problems involved with trying to organize organizational data consistently, we have seen a lot of successes stemming from our usages of a wiki. Confluence, itself, is an excellent tool and it’s promoted collaboration amongst the different groups (primarily development and product management) in a way that word documents cannot. It supports iterative document development and in an agile environment, that’s critical.

Above all us, keep things simple. Present the information that’s necessary and nothing more. Don’t try to get too fancy and most importantly, be consistent.