EMC's Rob Masson provides an overview of Wikis, identifying their role in the Enterprise software landscape as a solution for Collaboration. It examines their current capabilities and discusses their limitations.

Introduction

Wikis, along with Blogs, have become the hot new “killer app” in the public eye. They are the vanguard of a group of software designed to allow people to coordinate, share and manage information as a group. This kind of software has been in existence for several years under the label of “collaboration software” or “groupware”, but the advent of cheap and easy to use solutions like Wikis with Internet-wide distribution have pushed these applications into the public spotlight and lit the fires of the User’s imagination.

This is the first in a series of articles that will investigate Wikis, what they are, how they are used, and how they can be implemented using Documentum’s Content Server and Webtop software. In this first article we will discuss in general terms what a Wiki is, its strengths and its weaknesses.

What is a Wiki?

A Wiki can be broadly defined as a groupware application that facilitates the creation, editing and linking of Web Pages. It greatly simplifies the process of creating pages at the expense of restricting the formatting available to the user. Typically Wikis offer either a WYSIWYG editor to create pages that alleviates the user needing to understand markup or offer a very simple editor and a simplified form of markup so that knowledge of HTML is not required by contributors. Typically editing of pages is available to all members of the group and is encouraged, spreading the task of editing and maintenance across the entire community.

A more complete definition and history can be found here: Wiki Definition

Key Wiki Features

A Wiki has several key features that distinguish it from other groupware tools:

• Facilitates co-authoring– All users of the Wiki have the ability to submit changes to pages for publication. This allows for a community ownership model and pages get enriched over time as more and more contributions are made.
• Web-based – Wikis are a purely web based application which makes deployment and access easy and ubiquitous. They can be easily deployed to corporate infrastructures as they have minimal issues with firewalls and corporate port restrictions.
• Simple markup – Wiki Pages support a limited, simplified markup. Users should not have to understand HTML but can still do basic formatting (bold and italicize) as well as create links within the Wiki easily (see below). This truly fosters widespread adoption as it removes the most common barrier to adoption: fear and uncertainty about the technology.
• Cross linking of pages – This feature truly defines the Wiki model and advantage. By making link creation easy and convenient the users are encouraged to enhance the value of pages by cross-linking them. This defines the metaphor of a Wiki which is a relational web of information. This creates a “Network Effect” where the value of the information is increased as the number of connections increase. Additionally by linking to one page that is the authority on a particular topic you reduce redundancy and versioning issues further enhancing the currency and value of the information.
• Imbedded links to the web at large – In addition to internal links within the Wiki itself, Wiki’s also support links out to the rest of the Web via traditional URL’s. This further enhances the value of the pages by adding in the connections to the Web at large.
• Inter-Wiki linking – Wiki links can be to other Wikis as well as the current Wiki. The InterWiki pattern and protocol allows the linking between Wikis without resorting to raw URL’s. This further facilitates cross-linking and again we see a Network Effect.
• Auto-linking – Some Wiki’s have the capability to automatically generate links between pages by scanning for existing unique names within the text. These links can be to existing pages or to newly created “stubs” which contain no information but have been generated in anticipation of users adding information at a later date. This “priming” of pages encourages growth of the Wiki and thus continues the Network Effect.
• Versioning of pages – As changes are made the pages themselves are versioned to allow the roll-back to a previous version should the changes be deemed as inaccurate or inappropriate.

How are Wikis being used?

Wikis are being used by a wide variety of different user communities for related but different purposes.

Internet users – This is all of us on the Internet. Wikis are being used as the go to place for research as in the example of Wikipedia. In addition Wikis are becoming common aspects of larger sites that are building communities. Instead of having a simple FAQ or a series of HOWTOs Wikis are being put in place and maintained as a group effort between the site owners and the users.

Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) – For SMBs Wikis are common replacements for Intranets. They provide collaboration capabilities for knowledge management around areas as diverse as human resources information to technical details about products. In addition they are commonly being used for project management and content management. Wikis provide a good solution for capturing project artifacts and versioning/coordinating information across the whole team.

Enterprises – Larger enterprises are seeing similar uses of Wikis as SMBs, but at the departmental level. Having various knowledge management and project coordination requirements and frustrated at the lack of enterprise-wide solutions they are implementing point solutions on their own using freely available or hosted Wiki solutions.

What are Wikis lacking?

Wikis have experienced amazing growth and adoption. They provide many great features which we discussed above and their ease of use has helped fuel their rapid adoption. Despite this success, as Wikis become deeply integrated into the core business process of SMB and Enterprise customers there are several issues that become apparent.

• Minimal security– Wikis foster community authoring and shared management. In a larger enterprise or even in SMB applications, this can be somewhat problematic. It becomes necessary to have fine degrees of control over user rights and even visibility of information. Current solutions offer little in this area, and those that do, typically offer it at only very coarse levels of granularity. In addition, enterprise customers do NOT want to have to manage multiple sets of users and permissions, so integration to Active Directory or LDAP solutions is vital.
• Lack of content repurposing – Wiki pages are great for browser access, but the information contained within those pages has value and applicability in a variety of different presentation mediums. Groups of pages could serve as a manual for printing or a series of simple HTML Pages. Content repurposing allows different applications and aspects of the business to leverage the value of information throughout the organization. This is functionality beyond the Wiki product offerings but is a critical aspect of content management Systems like Documentum.
• Scalability issues – Part of the appeal of many Wiki solutions is that they are simple and easy to set up. This is typically done by sacrificing architectural sophistication for easy installation. This is a fine tradeoff for departmental solutions but becomes more problematic as the solution grows to an enterprise scale. Scalability of the solution is key and may require capabilities such as content distribution, caching and federation across a global deployment
• No retention policy enablement – For larger organizations defining retention policies is essential. Current Wiki offerings do not address the issue of defining how long to maintain information, how to archive it and where to store it for later access. This is an aspect of more sophisticated content management solutions but certainly has applicability in a solution like a corporate Wiki with wide use and adoption.

Conclusion

We have provided you with an overview of Wikis and their key features. They are undoubtedly a powerful tool for sharing, and coordinating information among a population of users and becoming very popular solutions within companies to address their needs. However it is also important to understand their limitations and that these point solutions can be a boon in the shot term but a bane as they grow rapidly in popularity and criticality.

In the next article we will examine how eRoom and Documentum Collaborative Edition can provide much of this functionality and where they differ from the Wiki model.