MetaChat - Help me suck up to my boss!

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31 October 2007

Help me suck up to my boss! →[More:]I just got chosen to act in a job for a month - a job which will be advertised during that month and that I want to apply for. In order to maximise my chances, I want to do something that will make me stand out as a candidate. One of the roles of this job is to manage the quality system, particularly tools (documents) that are used by all staff in the unit and which we will be audited under ISO shortly after my acting stint.

This has traditionally been a nightmare because, although the bulk of the documents are fairly static and are uploaded to an Intranet and all is well there, there are a number of less formal tools that end up being stored in all sorts of places and people are always struggling to find them or to know which is the right version.

I've always thought that a Wiki would be a good solution to this, so that the information that is stored on various documents scattered across any number of mapped drives (which are mapped differently for different staff) can be put in one place where it is easily accessible.

The problem is that I have no resources at all to do this (apart from my time). I am looking for a Wiki that can be installed in a directory on the server and which doesn't need any particular back-end support. After scouring AskMe, it seems that either Kwiki or Tiddly Wiki fit the bill. Can anyone recommend either of these, or have any other suggestions? I need to know today, because I need to start working on this over the weekend (its Thursday here and I'm on the road on Friday) to ensure that I can get it set up, bedded in and in use as early as possible. I was only offered the acting role yesterday afternoon and am packing my desk and moving to the new role this afternoon.

post by: dg at: 18:01 | 9 comments

Use your tongue liberally.

posted by ethylene 31 October | 18:17

Don't use TiddlyWiki - it's only for one person at a time.

When I introduced a wiki at work I got an old, unused PC. I downloaded XAMPP (not secure but good enough to get started) and then I ran MediaWiki on it.

All together you may find this to be all of an hour or two's work.

Make sure you share the admin chores as widely as possible - after all, that's the point of a wiki.

posted by dodgygeezer 31 October | 18:44

Actually at the very, very, very beginning I ran it from my own PC. I didn't suffer many ill effects although rebooting is a pain.

posted by dodgygeezer 31 October | 18:46

I can't add machines to the network or install anything on an existing machine, or share drives on any machine or any of the things that would make this easy - all I can do is add files to a shared drive. At the worst, I will set up some HTML pages manually, but that means nobody else will be able to maintain it, so it's not a long-term solution.

posted by dg 31 October | 19:08

When you say TiddlyWiki is only for one person at a time, surely you don't mean that only one person can view the information at a time? It doesn't matter if only one person can edit at a time for this "proof of concept".

posted by dg 31 October | 19:10

Wikis suck unrepentantly (excepting Wikipedia, which has achieved critical mass). Wikis are where documents go when they don't want to be found again. Wikis are unstructured repositories that do virtually nothing to address the revision control issues you're already having, because they do not natively handle the existing document formats. Wikis are yet another markup language that nobody wants to learn. Wikis are generally not integrated into filesystem operations, and are instead one more place to have to upload stuff, which is a version-control nightmare in it's own right. It's also one more service that you've got to tie into your directory.

Your job is not to set up a wiki - your job is to become the Lord of Taxonomy, and create a naming system whereby people know how to name their content & where to put it. Build a rock-solid taxonomy and then think about the "presentation layer".

Remember:

People want to do what's right, but they will do what's easy.

Having said all that, I like Microsoft's SharePoint Services, because it's a managed & structured repository that does versioning of documents and can be integrated into the client workstation at the filesystem level, if Office is installed. Sharepoint Services can be installed onto a W2K3 box in about 1 hour; W2k3 can be run under VirtualPC if you need, albeit slowly. If you can't do SharePoint, you might also look at Subversion w/ WebDAV or tortoiseSVN clients.

posted by Triode 31 October | 20:09

I'm not an IT guy, so be warned. BUT, a friend/coworker and I once tried to roll out a small wiki among the other analysts in our bullpen (think 12 22-24 year olds, all computer savvy but not techies). It worked well for VERY informal information--posting dates/directions to a party, sharing the hotel fax # for a Managing Director on the road, links to a couple restaurants--but nothing business-y ever caught on.

At this new job we use (here come the LOLs) public folders in Outlook. It's perfect. A folder structure that mimics what people already use for emails, menus/commands everyone is familiar with, a program that people have open all day anyway, clear fields showing the 'sender'/timestamps/etc. Sadly we are moving away from public folders and implementing an expensive, slow, unintuitive CRM "solution". Which I think is just a conspiracy to torture executive assistants whose executives give up on learning something new and hand off all interaction to their assistants.

posted by mullacc 31 October | 20:38

Okay: "Use your tongue liberally" and "TiddlyWiki" lead to some very interesting and inappropriate images. Thanks.

posted by mudpuppie 01 November | 01:04

It's only inappropriate if it doesn't work.

Thanks for the suggestions. I have used Outlook for this purpose before, in a different environment, but I don't think it will work here because of storage space limits.

posted by dg 01 November | 02:14

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