The new Intranet project!

I work for a firm with a little more than 100 employees and just like many other IT firms out there, my employer had gone thru a few ups and downs and “right-sizing” measures.

However, things are looking good, the sales team is busy doing demos and Business Analysis are busy analysing, managers busy managing and we programmers are busy coping with the tight deadlines and training new recruits!

Bad news is that no one knew what others where up to! We had a company intranet, but it was scattered on three (or more?) PCs, and lived largely on countless number of hard disks and some even on CDs placed in random machines CD drives, permanently!! A right mess!!

There was some talk about finding a new knowledge management solution and no surprise here HR folks came up with Macromedia Contribute. Cheap, WYSIWYG and easy to use, according to the HR girl, who thinks doing HTML coding requires a PhD in M-Theory or a super IQ which no one in HR could possible have! Well, I have to agree with her on the latter!

I did some research on different collaboration and knowledge base systems, and happened to notice the whole Wiki Paradigm, and realised what we have been missing!

The idea of a wiki was solid, and very clearly exactly suitable to the job at hand, free exchange of information, which is easily searchable and maintainable. Wikipedia, Wiktionary and a few other websites where more than enough to convince me the scalability and reliability of the idea.

However, choosing the right wiki was a pain. There are a whole bunch of them and everyone seems to be extremely opinionated when it comes to their favourite version of wiki. Soon I realised, when some one says they have tried XyzWiki and they think it’s the best, I should read between lines to understand ‘they have only used XyzWiki; and they think it’s the best because they don’t know any other’! I had to do more homework before I recommend a specific wiki.

To test different versions, I considered a whole bunch of wikis, including TWiki, JSPWiki, PHPWiki, MediaWiki etc.

PHPWiki was a song to install and looked very promising with a whole bunch of templates for any look and feel.

JSPWiki didn’t impress me, even though most of our engineers are JSP Pros, I didn’t feel confident enough about its user base or its future growth.

MediaWiki, was impressive, and it was endorsed by every major wiki website (like wikipedia). It was very minimalist though.

TWiki installation was a dog! It took me hours to get my head around it, but once installed, and performance fixed, it was a good-looking, solid wiki.
End of the day, there were a few issues to look at;

1) A bunch of users who were afraid of anything other than MS Word. Convincing them to use a wiki and wiki syntax was like convincing a 4 year old to give up their most favourite toy!
2) Maintainability and future development and growth. Should have matured user base and should be serious about keeping this going for a good while.
3) Performance and security. My company, unfortunately, has a pre-cold war era mindset when it comes to protecting even not-so-sensitive data. My managers wouldn’t sleep too well if every document is well protected, from eyes of the unknown enemy (read competition and cow-boy-contractor-programmers)!!

I brought down my choice into two version of wiki based on the following assumptions:

JSPWiki was out of the picture because it didn’t had a huge user base, it probably would get a lot better in future, but couldn’t guarantee it.

MediaWiki was brilliant, but too simplistic. I couldn’t impress anyone with it, especially the type who is vehemently anti good-logic!

PHPWiki – good, easy to install and over all very effective

TWiki – same as above, and looks business with the default pattern.

I left the decisions to my managers, who as all managers look for pretty pictures and big font.

They decided TWiki is the best bet, as it looks nice, and I agree, I was more inclined towards TWiki than PHPWiki for a number of reasons.

1) TWiki looks impress right out of the box.
2) These two couldn’t be any more different when it comes to installation – TWiki was a pain, where as PHPWiki a breeze! However, TWiki, once installed, is very maintainable with a very straightforward.
3) Network integration for authorisation and authentication was also very easy.
4) PHPWiki looked more internet oriented, with features like discussion forums and polls etc which made it look more like a random internet site and less suitable for a professional business environment. Of course that was before playing around wth the templates, but as with all most of the businesses these days, everyone is under pressure and who had time to verify all possible options!

Conclusion: We now have a good TWiki running in a beefy server, and even the most conservative MS Word addicts are warming up to it. I have given up searching for a good WYSIWYG editor for TWiki as I believe we have learned to live with out it, and the site is now very usable and extremely functional!

Good day! :)

External links:

Wikis

TWiki : http://www.twiki.org
PHPWiki: http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/
JSPWiki: http://www.jspwiki.org/
MediaWiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/

Popular Wiki websites

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wiktionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Main_Page