Introduction

Nowadays, on the internet, wiki's¹⁾ are everywhere. This is not only true for public wiki's, but also inside organizations wiki's are used more and more as a documentation system and a means of communication. The most renowned one, without a doubt, is Wikipedia. The site WikiLeaks is another one, but not everyone appreciates its content. However, both have the same function: provide information to a large audience.

The wiki name comes from the Hawaiian language and means quick. Its inventor was inspired when he stepped on the Wiki Wiki bus ²⁾.

Organizing and centralizing documents

A wiki is a handy tool to compose, organize and centralize company documentation like eg. working instructions and work-flow. By using a simple syntax many users can add or modify texts, illustrations and other files. New pages are created on-the-fly as soon as a non existing link is clicked from an existing page

The possibilities of including multimedia files make it relatively easy to add e.g. video presentations and step-by-step tutorials. Also adding newsfeeds that are relevant for a company's daily practice are achieved in a jiffy.

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Potential chaos

A good wiki system serves as a centralized and organized repository of company knowledge. However, a wiki also allows a company to create an enormous chaos consisting of texts and text fragments in a very short period of time. This is a real danger when rules and templates are lacking. Also undesirable is a wiki that is open and editable for every user of the system.

eQTeam acquired a lot of knowledge by designing, configuring and creating content for several different wiki applications. This website built by using DokuWiki is a good example. Content is available via all modern devices, hereby scaling automatically to adapt for the right screen size. Combined with our longtime experience in the field of information requirement analysis, we are well suited to set up a wiki-system for your company working with your employees to build a repository for all your company's documentation.

Documents are problematic

Mr. André Koot, Principal consultant, descibes this problem strikingly:

A few years ago, the organization that I worked for at that time, had to migrate to a new version of the MS Office suite. This was necessary, because the organization wanted to make use of the new Sharepoint version as a new document management system.
Sharepoint can only be used correctly when all employees use Office and Sharepoint in the way that Microsoft planned it. However, I have never seen that work in practice. In most cases, Sharepoint is being used in the same way as we have come acustomed to, namely as a hierarchical directory structure on a fileserver.
Thus, using Sharepoint results in the same chaos as we are used to see for a long time: many copies of each document, version management problems, corrupt files, and, last but not least, compatibility issues, because MS Office is not able to store files in a transparant and future-proof format.

Source: Weersta Cryptolocker, weg met documenten (in Dutch), 22-05-2015, translation by eQTeam

Solution: use a wiki

But the author also provides a solution in the same article:

My idea to solve these issues, I described in a policy paper. Stop using documents and transition to managing the information in a content management system.
The idea comprises of the storage of memo's, reports and notes in a CMS or enterprise wiki. I love wiki's: there is only one current version of a page, older versions are available instantly, showing revision changes between various versions of the pages. And, no compatibility problems: all texts are stored in its purest form allowing layout to be reproduced as its rules are stored transparantly as well.
And, if you would like to make a hard copy, just generate a convenient pdf file. Last but not least, wiki's have very clever search funtions. Try that in a clumsy Sharepoint environment that was installed with default settings.

At the top of this page we describe our view on wiki's, and how these should be used and not be used. We explain as well why eQTeam is the right party to help you execute and manage these projects.