Wikis In the Workplace

Most likely when you hear the work “wiki” you think of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, as you probably know, is a wildly popular online encyclopedia. If you haven’t integrated Wikipedia into your daily live you are really missing out, but that isn’t the topic of this post. This post is about the role of wikis in the workplace.

At the core a wiki is a text management system that allows people to create, edit, and share articles online. A wiki can be used for many things, not just encyclopedic content. For example, one common use of wikis is to create online help documentation. The wiki is the best choice to store many kinds of company knowledge because it flexible, accessible, and it maintains revision history.

The storage and sharing of company knowledge is critical to the success of any business. Employees must know processes, procedures, policies, and information each day to accomplish their work. If a person quits or calls in sick the other employees must have the information they need to compensate for the missing team member. If your office is like most offices, the vast majority of this information is stored in the heads of a few key employees. This is clearly not the most effective solution. Any office must have a persistent and accessible method of storing this critical information.

A wiki is the perfect solution to this problem. By creating a secure company-wide wiki you and your employees can begin to document their job and share their knowledge. Policies can be shared more easily, processes that are only known by few can be performed by many, and everyone can learn new skills that will enhance the value of themselves and the company.

We use a wiki at Atlas Bay for a variety of purposes. One of the most important uses of a wiki for us is to document technical processes. By storing this information in our wiki there is no need for multiple people to figure out the same problem. Additionally, when we must perform a task again after many months of learning the task we can simply read our wikis for any procedures and notes regarding the task.

Another use of our wiki is software specification documentation. When working on a new project we work closely with a customer to determine exactly what they are looking for and what their needs are. By using our company wiki to to store this data, each person working on that project team has constant access to that information and can make updates as need.

I strongly recommend that your company utilize a wiki and begin to centralize your company knowledge. The process is simple and affordable. Your wiki will start out small, but over time it will grow organically into a large an useful collection of information that will increase the effectiveness of your business.

Product Review: DropBox

For the last 6 month I’ve been using DropBox (www.getdropbox.com) for all my file sharing and backup needs. The app does a great job with version control and has been crucial for sharing files with others.

The only problems are noticed are that:

1. Sometimes the interface can be a little confusing — it’s too simple. I think they should box some stuff in a little bit. It would be really nice if they also incorporated FB Connect and allowed you to invite any of your friends to view certain files.

2. You cannot share sub folders: you are only able to share the root folders. This isn’t a big deal though.

3. The url of the files uploaded to the Public folder don’t work on my computer. They also aren’t working on my brother’s account. I’ll have to look into this a little more — I doubt it doesn’t work for anyone.

All things considered, this is a great app. The free version is more than enough for most users. Companies or people that really need their files online can pay $100/yr for 50gb of online storage that automatically syncs to any computer that has the client installed.

Cloud Hosting Experience

Recently, we have switched most of our hosting accounts over to Mosso’s (http://www.mosso.com) cloud hosting service. Previously, we were using virtual servers or dedicated servers to host all of our web applications and websites for Atlas Bay as well as our clients. My early experiences with Mosso have been great.

First, the technology Mosso uses is up to date and diverse. I can host websites using the latest version of .Net and PHP in the same folder without worry about configuring IIS to use PHP or any other complex scenarios. With Mosso, I can simply upload my application and it will figure out how to properly host it. So far everything has worked really well and been incredibly easy.

Second, there customer service has been incredible. I don’t really like to bother calling in to places for simple questions so I love there instant chat feature. On every page of their website and control panel there is a link to chat instantly with technical support. I have had every issue or question resolved in a matter or 1 or 2 minutes. It has been super convenient and saved me a lot of time.

Third, I love the integrated billing system. Now with Mosso, we dont have to create invoices for our hosting clients and process each payment separately. Mosso will take care of the billing and pay us directly. This service is really convenient and offered at a fair price (4% or $2, per transaction). For the amount of time this saves us I will gladly pay the service fee.

My one complaint, which is why we just started using Mosso, is that it took them a long time to roll out .net 3.5 sp1. I understand the issues with breaking changes, but I believe it is important for them and other hosting companies to making a commitment to supporting the newest technology. This is going to be an issue they will have to deal with in order to keep me as a long term customer. I can pretty much guarantee that if it takes them 6+ plus months to deploy the next version of .Net they will loose my business. Hopefully, they will have this worked out so they can quickly deploy new releases of frameworks and web servers without negatively impacting legacy software.

Overall, I am extremely satisfied with Mosso and I would recommend it to anyone who is deploying web applications on either Windows or Linux.