Trisummit Technologies

Jive Software has now released their new plugin called Ideation. It is an idea storming application to be used directly within your communities. We have been seeking the perfect idea storming application for some of our various communities and there are several things that I like about this one.

1. It sits directly inside of your community as a new tab. Many idea storming solutions are hosted outside of the community.
2. It is implemented as a plugin so it does not require any customization to your base application.
3. It has all of the components of a full blown idea storming application to bring your community driven ideas to fruition.
4. If you are already a customer of Jive Software, the cost for the implementation is similar to most of thier other add-on modules – about $20,000.

For now I am posting the pdf file provided by Jive Software which goes over the high level conceptualization of idea storming. I am also providing the link to the 45 minute recorded webex presentation provided by Jive Software.

PDF Presentation Slides

Webex Presentation of Ideation

Other enterprise level idea storming applications we have looked at were as follows:
1. Salesforce.com which was quoted to us at around $100,000.
2. Lithium technologies which also does well with this application – but you need to be on Lithium for your communities to use this.
3. Jira has idea storming built in; however, this is in a project management / bug tracking application – not the community which is where it would be most useful. Atlassian would benefit by placing this application inside of Confluence instead.

Now that we have been able to kick the tires some, we give the Jive Software Ideation plugin two thumbs up.

My intent in this blog is to help jumpstart someone who is new to wikis and has been tasked to learn or prepare to deploy a wiki.

1. What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a collaborative tool used to allow a group of people to jointly contribute to a document. Typically, how it works is that say a person wants documentation on a software program. The company will task several individuals to write the documentation. But instead of using Microsoft Word, the IS group puts up a wiki and each of the writers write their content to a wiki page. Now eventually, the jobs of the writers will cross. They may wish to contribute to the pages that the other writers have written because perhaps they know something the original author did not know. The wiki allows all writers to do just that. They can put in thier own two cents wherever they want to in the document.

Now suppose the manager of the document does not like the content of one of the contributors, and he or she feels that the latest changes to the document where really messed up. No problem. The manager of the document will have the ability to roll back the document to any previous version. It is very difficult to break a document in a wiki because the managers always have the ability to take out the trash.

2. Which Software Package is Best
There are some really good potential packages you can use. This is the list of wikis I have now used.

• Sharepoint
• JSPWiki
• PHPWiki
• MediaWiki
• Confluence

Sharepoint – Now Sharepoint is not just a wiki. Sharepoint is the collaboration tool that Microsoft wants everyone to use. It is an application that is quite customizable with a lot of out of the box web widgets that can create a really good project managment and organization tool for you. A Wiki is just one of its available web parts.

Personally, I am quite fond of Sharepoint. The last opportunity I had to project manage, I used Sharepoint as the team collaboration tool. All of the writeups for future reference where done with the Sharepoint wiki. For example, one person was tasked to make this integrate image support into the forums. After he built the functionality, he had to write up his specifications on a wiki page. Now, 6 months later, I still have his write up ready for reference. If things have changed, anyone with access can modify the contents.

The Sharepoint Wiki functionality is good for small groups. However, it is not near as robust as some of the other available wikis. What you get is a list of pages and the ability for anybody on the team to edit the page. There is no further organization of your wiki pages. If Sharepoint is your existing collaborative tool, I do recommend using it. However, if you are looking for collaborative wiki for wide scale use with a lot more really useful functionality, I would say that this is not the right tool.

JSPWiki – At first, I was rather impressed with this free open source package built on the Java Platform. I initially put it up for the Powergui team as a beta to see if it would serve their purposes for a wiki. We ran into some pitfalls with it.

• It did not run well on all platforms. It did best in a Linux / Apache / Tomcat environment. I could not get it to work on Resin. Lastly, it seemed to cause instability when I combined it on the same tomcat application server with Jive Integrated running on a Windows 2003 server sitting behind IIS.
• It was functionality deficient. You could roll back pages, but it did not have a good diff utility. Also, you could not set up email notifications for page changes. The users also complained about the inability to escape certain characters.
• On the positive side, the support team including Janne Jalkanin were very helpful even though they were working for free. My hats off to them.

Unfortuneatly, we had to scrap using JSPWiki and turn to a different platform.

PHPWiki – After scraping the JSPWiki project, I downloaded PHPWiki and installed it on a Red Hat Linux ES 5.0 server. This did not go well at all. PHPWiki required some PHP_DBA functions in order to work. Those PHP_DBA functions are not in the out of the box RPM installation of PHP on Red Hat. I searched and searched for the proper RPM packages but could not find it. In order to get those functions up, I would have needed to uninstall PHP via the RPMs and reinstall php by compiling the source code with all of the required flags to make it work. That was just too much work for my feeble mind so I said “Forget It”!!! I have time on my hands, but not that much time.

MediaWiki – After failing now on two Wikis for the Powergui community, I dug up one called Media Wiki. Media Wiki is the wiki software used by Wikipedia. After my frustrations with PHPWiki, this one was a breath of fresh air. Installation was probably the simplest I have ever seen for any out of the box web application installation. This wiki is functionality rich having all the items that JSPWiki did not have. Administration is user freindly. It has good internationization support as well. The Powergui Team thus far has been rather pleased with this choice. I give this application two thumbs up for a wide scale collaborative tool – especially in terms of being an external wiki for documenting a software package. Also, this software package is a free open source application. Nice job!!!

http://mediawiki.org

Confluence – There are certain groups in Quest Software that make use of this Wiki made by Atlassian and I have recently been assigned to take over the administration of this application. It is a very good platform built on Java and is probably the most functionality rich of all Wikis. It includes watch support, tree structure organization, rich permission functionality, and even the ability to integrate with your active directory. It has the best user interface making it simple for anyone to use. It is very expandable and organizable and works well for large organizations with many teams. It also supports a rich scripting which for those who have taken the time to learn gives then far greater power at organizing content. This platform from my perspective is the darling of all wikis. The only weakness is that it does cost. Last time I checked it was about $7,500 for an unlimited use external collaboration license. If that is not a factor to you, you will not go wrong with this one. http://www.atlassian.com/

In the end, I give two thumbs up for both Media Wiki and Confluence.