Saturday, November 6, 2010

The Wiki at Work

At my workplace, the corporate wiki is used to communicate information to and from end users of the data warehouse. Included on the wiki are tools, support links, overviews, education information and class scheduled, newsletters, current data availability, outages, and a knowledgebase. It is internal to the company. The information is targeted to end users but is useful for executives and managers who want to know trends and numbers.

The wiki is managed by the end user program. The underlying tool is a customized sharepoint application. Not all users have read/write access but all users are granted read access to most pages. Some users have administrator privileges.

Content is managed both manually and automatically. Some tools are available for marking the expiration date of pages, for example, but no tools exist for easily adding search keywords, identifying target audience, author, or creation date. Some tools exist for workflow and approval management. A customized application allows users to select forms for creating mass emails.

More tools are needed to manage the content hierarchy, easily accessible expiration date pickers, and for adding metadata around author, keywords, title, content type, and summary. Content is placed in an explorer-type folder system but the typical end user does not have access to the storage structure. Consequently, content can be difficult to find and the end user does not know how much content exists, if it is expired or duplicated, or if it applies to their role.

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