Wiki Communications?
by Ronald J Nelson · in General Discussion · 04/28/2009 (8:12 pm) · 6 replies
I have a question I am asking on behalf of a freind who is attending a college course dealing with corporate computer security and communications. My freind asked me if something were teaching was true because she knew I was working with alot of different companies, I can honestly say I never use this method.
What they are teaching is that email and instant message communication is a thing of the past, and that all inter-communication should be done via a wiki.
The common uses I have always seen where everyone contributes what is most times useful information to a central location to be shared with others. My more common use is wikis such as the Torque wiki, which is to share procedures and methods with others that might find them useful.
They say that all communications, including day-to-day communications should be done via a wiki. My opinion, for what its worth, is that sounds ridiculous, but I wanted to hear from others out there, especially those of you with companies.
Maybe I have been doing something wrong if you have college professors with Doctorates preaching this, but I have been taught many things in college that I learned later were a load of crap in the real world.
What they are teaching is that email and instant message communication is a thing of the past, and that all inter-communication should be done via a wiki.
The common uses I have always seen where everyone contributes what is most times useful information to a central location to be shared with others. My more common use is wikis such as the Torque wiki, which is to share procedures and methods with others that might find them useful.
They say that all communications, including day-to-day communications should be done via a wiki. My opinion, for what its worth, is that sounds ridiculous, but I wanted to hear from others out there, especially those of you with companies.
Maybe I have been doing something wrong if you have college professors with Doctorates preaching this, but I have been taught many things in college that I learned later were a load of crap in the real world.
#2
For group conferencing, there are many tools. I'm quite happy with just a multi-user chatroom on IM or IRC. Getting a Jabber server for internal use going is a piece of cake, while bigger collaboration tools (which include features far beyond just chat and files) can take some work. Some cost a bit of money, but some can be rented.
Lots of different technologies are still in use which can be considered very old now, but hopefully we can teach people to stop sending gigantic Word documents with their e-mail ;)
04/29/2009 (10:31 am)
E-mail is not dead, but when dropping some sourcecode to other devs, it's usually better to use FTP, make a link on the internal wiki and then send an e-mail to the interested parties, unless the wiki in question has update notification/RSS :)For group conferencing, there are many tools. I'm quite happy with just a multi-user chatroom on IM or IRC. Getting a Jabber server for internal use going is a piece of cake, while bigger collaboration tools (which include features far beyond just chat and files) can take some work. Some cost a bit of money, but some can be rented.
Lots of different technologies are still in use which can be considered very old now, but hopefully we can teach people to stop sending gigantic Word documents with their e-mail ;)
#3
Containing and condensing data for research or for perusal by a group as a means of information sharing is certainly feasible but replacing personal communications = ridiculous!
But an email/IM/wiki/conferencing/web-browsing all-in-one app could be useful.
04/29/2009 (10:37 am)
Whoa, that's a crazy idea. I know that schools aren't the most accurate purveyors of correct information... but still!Containing and condensing data for research or for perusal by a group as a means of information sharing is certainly feasible but replacing personal communications = ridiculous!
But an email/IM/wiki/conferencing/web-browsing all-in-one app could be useful.
#4
04/29/2009 (10:40 am)
@Ronny: and what's wrong with gigantic Word documents as the email message? I'm guilty of that one myself, lol!
#5
Hell, you could use a wiki with a Word/PDF output plugin and write it as a wiki page in the first place!
04/29/2009 (10:54 am)
What's wrong? You could permanently link it from your wiki, that's what ;)Hell, you could use a wiki with a Word/PDF output plugin and write it as a wiki page in the first place!
#6
@Andy - Thank you for such a well informed and insightful reply, it was way better than I could have hoped for.
04/29/2009 (2:42 pm)
Excellent answers all, and exactly what I believed with a bit more interesting info from Andy.@Andy - Thank you for such a well informed and insightful reply, it was way better than I could have hoped for.
Torque Owner Andy Rollins
ZDay Game
Three trends that are happening:
1. Companies are going mobile - whether it's wireless networks, handheld devices (blackberry,etc), small form laptops so all these major companies
2. Virtualisation - That includes everything from CPU's, memory and storage, a lot of smaller software vendors are having to play catch up on this one whether it is getting their software supported or reviewing their licensing terms i.e. where they used to license on a per CPU basis.
3. As people and companies are sharing information more freely now they're using the tools available, typically email (Gartner claimed that around 80% of all business knowledge sharing is done via email) and it's not about to change soon. This means the cost of corporate email is growing substantially and companies are beginning to look at alternatives but I'd say the term is more Dashboards and Portals than Wiki's as the solution.
Hence why SAP Portal, Oracle Portal and Microsoft SharePoint are all prominent offerings in their lineups now, Microsoft are most agressively pushing this with SharePoint and getting it integrated with office, exchange, etc so that people are using it rather than unstructured data (emails and networked fileshares).
SharePoint does include a wiki tool (as long as your on SharePoint 2007) but it's a small part of the solution rather than a major piece of the jigsaw.
SAP are bolstering their options too, purchasing Business Objects late 2007 was a major move for them bringing better Business Intelligence tools and Enterprise Information Management (EIM), I can't share too much as some of the future roadmap for SAP is under NDA but I can say their roadmap for the future includes a Data Services piece as big chunk and part of that data services platform will be mining of unstructured data (i.e. emails) to try and unlock a lot of business value stored away in peoples inboxes.
As a front-end SAP will integrate with either SAP Portal or SharePoint (using Business Objects) and they're keen to push portals and dashboards.
Not sure why they would teach your friend that email is dead, I would say instant messaging in the workplace hasn't really taken off yet with many companies firewalls blocking access to IM services.
Are you sure your friend understood correctly? More information is being pushed to web based platforms (intranets, dashboards, portals, wikis) but it won't replace email altogether.