Wiki as Forum, FAQ, HTML Editor, XML Editor, or CMS?

A wiki can be a Frequently Asked Questions repository, much like the knowledge bases in their heyday in the late 80s. My favorite line from the blog entry has to be its closer: 'It's about a different way of thinking around how to interact with the community.' And that is what I have explored with my wiki presentation, about how to build community with a wiki and be an active member of that community. But what are other uses of the wiki?

Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2007). Articles>Documentation>Content Management>Wikis

Did Technical Documentation Play a Role in the White House's Decision to Move to Drupal?

The reasons for the White House's decision to run its Web site, whitehouse.gov, on the open source content management system Drupal are being discussed on various Web sites. Alongside Drupal's functionality, flexibility and openness, some are suggesting that Drupal's documentation was also a key factor for deciding to use this system.

Pratt, Ellis. Cherryleaf (2009). Articles>Documentation>Content Management>Government

A Few Surprises in Using a Wiki for Documentation

Recently I’ve been working on a simple calendar project that uses a wiki for documentation. Although I’ve heard a lot about using wikis for documentation, and have even used them in the past, I ran into a few surprises this time.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Documentation>Content Management>Wikis

Wikis and the Holy Grail of Content Independence

The concept of having control over your help content, to update it at any time, is what I’m calling content independence. Establishing content independence in your publishing environment may be a battle that can take years. For example, at a previous job, it took five years to finally convince architecture that we needed and deserved our own independent folder on a production server. In my current situation, I’ve pursued publishing routes in infrastructure that would enable on-the-fly updating, but for two years in a row I’ve come up empty-handed. With wikis, I think I’ve finally found the holy grail of content independence.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Wikis

Plone vs. SharePoint, Round 2: A By-Platform Feature Comparison

An organization we at Reflab work with recently re-evaluated Plone against Sharepoint 2007; their main requirements are related to document management, where Sharepoint is for sure quite strong. What’s interesting is that they made the comparison also considering the different platforms and browsers their organization uses. Here are the results of their analysis and tests, they where so kind to share them with us, I checked them and translated them. I hope you’ll find them useful.

Ciriaci, Francesco. WordPress (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Plone

Documentation Collaboration Service

Collaboration happens when multiple people work simultaneously towards a common goal. Collaboration software are tools which try to make working together easier and more productive. There are hundreds of methodologies and approaches out there to collaboration. We want to bring the focus on one particular dimension: open vs. structured collaboration.

Live Tech Docs (2009). Articles>Documentation>Content Management>Open Source

Ten Reasons Why I Like WordPress 

When choosing a blog platform, you have a variety of options: Drupal, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Joomla, Expression Engine, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and others. But when you start researching the options, WordPress seems to have at least 10 main strengths over its competitors.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Content Management>Blogging>WordPress

The Scoop on Content Strategy: An Interview with Kristina Halvorson 

As a participant in the Content Strategy Consortium at the IA Summit 2009, I have enjoyed watching content strategy grow into a user experience discipline. The most recent and significant sign of content strategy’s rise is the release of Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. Kristina is a renowned content strategist, co-curator of the Content Strategy Consortium, and president of Brain Traffic. I was honored to chat recently with Kristina about her new book.

Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Interviews>Content Strategy>Content Management

User-Generated Content 

Let’s say that you’re reading a news story about a particular area of geographic conflict and you decide to investigate further. Without an encyclopedia available, as fewer and fewer of us seem to have them on hand these days, you quickly check out your handy online references. To your surprise, the article on this disputed feature seems to be an amalgamation of strongly differing opinions and ideologies, to the point where the article has been locked down from further editing. Such is the nature of the brave new world of user-generated content, where a content publisher forges a careful alliance of sorts with a wide range of contributors across very diverse locales and cultures. Depending on the intended purpose of the provided content, the end result can take on a life of its own, as it becomes the focal point for a silent yet fervent battle over “fact” and “truth” from divergent viewpoints.

Edwards, Tom. TC World (2009). Articles>Content Management>Wikis>Social Networking

What Information Developers Can Learn from Software Developers 

The shift in information development from a narrative to a modular writing style reflects the established shift towards modularization of source code. What can information developers learn from software developers? What are the challenges and benefits of the modular approach?

Higgins, Paul. TC World (2009). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Documentation

Change Management – An Underestimated Success Factor 

Although the creation and translation of technical documents are essential parts of the product lifecycle they still play a subordinate role in most international organizations. Many companies are therefore leaving these tasks to an outsourcing provider. To ensure a smooth collaboration and guarantee high quality technical documents, the outsourcing process needs to be planned and supported thoroughly.

Grosser, Sabine and Rob Heemels. TC World (2008). Articles>Content Management>Outsourcing>Technical Writing

Tutorial: Turning WordPress into a CMS using WPML 

WordPress is fairly simple to set up as a CMS ‘out of the box’, but where it needs a lot of customization is for setting up ‘smart’ navigation and being able to serve up pages or posts in multiple languages.

Life @ iStudio (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>WordPress

Taking Content Strategy Personally 

If you don’t have a professional blog or web site, you may think that you don’t need to worry about content strategy. Think again. Celine gave some great advice in her article “How to Develop a Content Strategy for Your Professional Blog,” but these days our blogs and web sites aren’t the only windows to our professional souls. If you use social media platforms for professional purposes, you should consider having a content strategy for the material you publish on them as well.

Poole, Pamela. Web Worker Daily (2009). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy>Social Networking

Wikis in the Workplace: a Practical Introduction 

The wiki crops up in many companies' internal discussions about process improvements and efficient collaboration, but it is often shot down because so few people have exposure to good models of what a really successful business wiki can do. Ars is here to help with a practical introduction based on real-world examples.

Porter, Alan J. Ars Technica (2009). Articles>Content Management>Workplace>Wikis

Get Smart With SharePoint Documents 

Given the pressures on firms to provide increased value at lower costs, it’s imperative that they find ways to reduce the costs of creating and managing documents and increase their value to clients and personnel. Microsoft SharePoint provides a range of features to make your firm’s documents “smarter,” from capturing rich metadata to automating workflows to intelligent search. As applied, these features can transform passive documents into active, reusable resources. In this article I’ll describe some of the ways that SharePoint can reduce the effort to create, manage and retrieve documents and increase their value, as smart documents, to both your firm and its clients.

Gerow, Mark. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 Navigation Hierarchies and Key Filters 

The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference. I get excited about this kind of thing because metadata is a big part of all of the software we build. But some people are probably saying "Why should we get so excited about new metadata features in SharePoint? The new UI and improved capacity are really the neat things about SharePoint 2010."

Puffer, Charlie. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Microsoft SharePoint

A SharePoint Case Study: Switching on the Right Light Bulbs 

Having seen Microsoft SharePoint in action at a central government department they could see the potential around records management and enabling the delivery of other business outcomes through ensuring the right information (records) were available to the right audience, at the right time in an appropriate manner. This meant exposing information securely to their clients, internally on their intranet and to the wider citizen audience, something their current IT platforms wouldn’t support in a simple, cost effective manner.

Clay, Ant. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Microsoft SharePoint>Case Studies

SharePoint: A Case Study in Content Organization 

Many doctors across the country want to perform research and trials. As a result, there’s more than a little competition for that government funding. This is where my company and SharePoint enter the picture. The fundamental idea is that a master organization will recruit other doctors across the country and enlist those doctors’ practices in a particular research study.

Galvin, Paul. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Microsoft SharePoint>Case Studies

The Myth of Single-Source Authoring 

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2009). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Writing

Shotgun Communication 

After new product releases or service updates, a torrent of disparate corporate information follows based on the perceived requirements for each team to show their worth. Sales collateral, Marketing webcasts, Support knowledgebase articles, Engineering release notes, and internal reference guides from formal Documentation teams stagger out like drunken sailors looking for their ship after a Cinderella liberty. Add to this meandering information all of the informal input from bloggers, social sites, forums, and independent Web sites, and you have a fog of information to stumble through to find real knowledge and employ best practices for purchased products and services.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2007). Articles>Content Management>Organizational Communication>Business Communication

Knowledge from the Cloud 

How do you string together disparate pieces of information to generate working knowledge? For now, you need to put it together yourself as part of a document or other type of master repository. Hopefully, this will change in the near future with linked data applications, personalization of content based on semantic interpretation of information, and information aggregators to capture and present usable knowledge.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2008). Articles>Content Management>Semantic

The Fog of Information 

In our world, information comes at us from all sides with the same lack of wholeness or trustworthiness. News outlets twist assumptions and conclusions to pander to their audience’s political predispositions. Social networks include feedback from all types of personalities with some good and some self-serving, and some just plain erroneous information. Companies provide product information scattered across knowledgebases, web sites, forums, and formal documentation with a corporate bias aimed at the prospective sale. Emails clog up our inboxes and authenticity is at a premium. The result is an overload of questionable information and little functional knowledge.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>Content Management

The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1 

This deconstruction of content is not limited to Twitter. The movement to expose underlying data and make it more actionable is gaining momentum across industries and platforms. One example is the move to report financial data in XBRL format (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Another is the growing use of microformats and RDFa, which are small patterns of HTML that represent data on commonly published subjects on Web pages, such as people, events, blog topics, reviews, and tags. Twitter's character limit and accessibility, however, are the simplest and most recognized example of how elements of connected data can provide value both individually and in aggregate.

ReadWriteWeb (2009). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Social Networking

Fixing Enterprise Architecture: Balancing the Forces of Change in the Modern Organization 

There's long been something fairly unsatisfying about the relationship that enterprise architecture has had with the business side of most organizations. Recently there's a growing realization that traditional enterprise architecture as its often practiced today might be broken in some important way. What might be wrong and how to fix it are the questions du jour.

Hinchcliffe, Dion. ebiz (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design

The Three Waves of Enterprise 2.0: Climbing the Social Computing Maturity Curve 

The intranet is often a depressingly static place even today in many organizations. But those applying Enterprise 2.0 (social, emergent, freeform approaches to business activities) can soon find that the opposite is often the case. The information captured and the knowledge shared in a social business environment is usually globally visible and lasts long after the collaboration ends.

Hinchcliffe, Dion. ebiz (2009). Articles>Content Management>Organizational Communication