One of my tasks at work these days is to build a knowledge management solution for the company. We have Redmine in place which I favor; but if you want to manage knowledge, you have to be sensitive to its requirements and dissemination. Otherwise, the very people that would normally use a tool will swear off and not get involved. The trick is to balance the tools and make something that makes folks happy. So I started down the path of building an internal collaboration server. I settled on three wiki engines for people to look at which are Twiki, Mediawiki, and PMWiki

All of them offer a set of constructs and use which are similar; but Twiki seems to bill itself as a enterprise collaboration tool. Mediawiki is nothing short of amazing as it powers the Wikipedia and PMwiki is simply simple. My first test was installing and setup. Installing Twiki seems rather daunting at times and you can mess up the whole thing easily with a twiki.conf which is not written correctly. Mediawiki and Pmwiki install easily. Use is not much different that I can see. The markup language is all the same. Adoption is another area. Who will adopt a particular media and then publish on it? And why? It seems we all chose Twiki and now we are off and running on it. I do prefer simpler tools like PMwiki; but I can use Twiki.

Adoption Grids

Wiki’s are great tools to bring folks together, build networks that bind thoughts, and also allow people to refine ideas. They also need to be used. Simply put a wiki requires “we”. Without a “we”, there is no I on a wiki. Thoughts, expressions, verbal jousting. Its all grist for the wiki mill.

I found this project to be very satisfying in that i got to listen to my fellow product manager, the VP of our group, the CEO. I also happen to work for those guys so its easier. But I also wanted to see how the use would be. Would Sales people use the tool? We want Sales guys to reach the site, understand it, use it. We’ll see if the adoption grid stretches to encompass sales.