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Using a Wiki for Quick Documentation

If your business is anything like the businesses with which I normally deal one of the hardest items to tackle is documentation.  This can include all kinds of documentation from human resources processes to accounting practices to core business procedures to the information technology department’s system records.  Businesses need good documentation for many reasons.

Traditionally small businesses simply end up doing without key documentation and have to reinvent the wheel every time something comes up for which the people currently working have not had a chance to memorize the process.  Larger businesses often place their limited documentation into Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF files and store them away in an unsearchable file server or possibly even on paper – putting them into large, ringed binders that no one even knows exist let alone how to find necessary information within.  These are not effective processes, but there is a simple solution.

The solution is a web-based application known as a Wiki.  Most people get their first introduction to a Wiki through the ubiquitous online encyclopedia Wikipedia which is built on a Wiki platform (MediaWiki, to be specific), but this is hardly the only use for a Wiki.  Wikis are simple document repositories designed to allow many editors to easily create and modify online documentation.  The whole concept of the Wiki is about being simple and easy.  The full name, Wiki Wiki, means “quick” or “fast” in Hawaiian.

Wikis have now been around for several years and have begun to become popular in many businesses.  Wikis are generally very lightweight and there are many vendors making both open source and proprietary Wiki products in addition to several hosted services available online.  You can really pick out a Wiki based on your particular needs.  Most Wiki products are free and for the budget conscious business there is no reason to need to consider a Wiki to be a cost center.  This is a simple product that your IT department should be able to roll out for you quickly and easily giving you a documentation repository right away.

At first the idea of a Wiki is a bit foreign to most people.  On the Internet we often encounter Wikis in use for system documentation.  This is becoming increasingly popular. Wikis are often used to allow anyone to log in and make documentation changes.  This can be a good way to get started with your Wiki.  You can also start from the beginning with detailed user access controls allowing only certain individuals to post documentation in the system instead of allowing a documentation free-for-all.  Your needs will depend upon your type of organization.

What makes the Wiki concept powerful is the ease with which anyone can hop on, search for documents that they need and create or modify those documents if they cannot find the information for which they are looking.  The entire concept of the Wiki really encourages staff to make use of the format.  Lowering the barrier to creating useful documentation is the best possible way to get documentation created, and because the documentation is so easy to modify it makes it far more likely that that document will be kept up to date.

A common feature amongst Wiki systems is the idea of tracking changes to Wiki pages.  This means that if someone goes in and makes a change to a page that people using the Wiki system can view past versions of that document to see what changes have been made over time and by whom those changes were made.  This feature also makes it very simple for a system administrator to roll back bad changes if someone is not posting appropriately.

One of my personal favourite Wiki features is the idea of subscribing to a particular Wiki page either through email or an RSS feed.  The subscription model allows any staff members to be alerted to changes to documentation in which they take an interest.  These can be staff members for whom a particular Wiki page is critical to their job functions such as HR managers following changes to the corporate employment policies pages or just interested staff members who want to know when a page changes such as managers subscribing to the cafeteria’s lunch menu page or developers subscribing to a page about a particular software project’s status.

This method is a wonderful way to allow anyone to keep up with any publicly available knowledge without needing to interupt the actual process to view status.  Useful at every level of the organization and extremely simple.  So often organizations do a poor job of keeping everyone “in the loop” who needs to be and with the Wiki subscription model everyone has the opportunity to take responsibility for keeping themselves informed through whatever method is most useful to them.

As I mentioned before, there are many Wiki products available on the market today.  There are enough that choosing one is actually a rather formiddable task.  Some key differentiators between products include their use license, the data store architecture – typically filesystem based or database based, their platform dependence and their integration with other products and authentication systems.  Of course there is also the option of choosing a hosted Wiki service that hosts your Wiki online – mostly this is popular with companies using Wikis as a means of serving their customers rather than for private, internal documentation.  There are so many Wikis from which to choose that the site WikiMatrix is dedicated to helping you choose the Wiki that is best for you.

Before you dive into the world of exploring Wikis on your own I will mention a few that are rather popular and worth looking into early on in your Wiki decision making process.  Popular Wiki platforms include MediaWiki, DokuWiki, TWiki and pmWiki.  These are just the tip of the Wiki iceberg but provide a good look into the features that you should expect to see throughout your search for the best Wiki for your implementation.  The Wiki choosing wizard on the WikiMatrix web site is a great place to begin as well.  Each of these Wikis that I have mentioned thus far are available for free and rather than spending a lot of time studying their benefits you may wish to simply download one or more of them, install them on a spare server and give them a try.

In addition to stand-alone Wiki products like we have mentioned here there are also Wiki engines built into several enterprise content managment and portal systems such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Alfresco and Joomla.  For any businesses looking to make a larger investment in an enterprise content management system having a Wiki functionality built into that product can provide a single, unified Intranet web portal interface to serve many different internal documentation and document storage needs.

Wikis are powerful and affordable tools that small and medium businesses can leverage today, even in a climate of budget cuts and uncertainty, to document processes, ease documentation burdens and increase internal communications and efficiency.  It is unlikely that we will see the popularity of the Wiki concept wane but rather they are already beginning to take their place as a staple of the business documentation and communication process.

MicroBlogging for Business

If you mention microblogging to anyone today the first thing that you are going to get is an ear-full about the importance of social media and platforms for enabling the conversation and about customer interaction.  Okay, fine.  Over-hyped and poorly understood buzz that we can probably safely ignore for now.  Social media matters, yes, but spend some time on Twitter and, while a lot of people are talking, you will quickly learn that very few people are listening.  The platform is going somewhere, but right now most of the people talking in the microblogging space are talking about microblogging.  This will pass.  For now we have other concerns that are more immediate.

While I tend to quickly dismiss microblogging as the “next big thing in social media” as mostly hype from the marketing folks trying to convince people to look at them for another ten minutes I do think that the concept of a highly limited, easy to use, microblogging architecture to be one of great potential import to business.

When I talk about microblogging for business I am not talking about the popular notion of sending your intern out to post about your product on Twitter in order to garner market attention.  What I am talking about is using an internal microblogging infrastructure to deliver status about the people in your organization to your organization.  In the same way that companies have internal blogs delivering information to their own staff the microblogging platform can be an internal tool for our organization and not just something that we use to tell our friends across town what we are having for lunch.

Other social communications tools like traditional blogging, instant messaging, email, etc. started as over-hyped social media, even if the term did not exist yet, and ended up becoming standard, well understood business communication tools that are important pieces of the corporate communications toolkit today.  Microblogging will be the same.  And, like all of those communications tools that came before it, this tool is one that your company can start using today to get the benefits years before your competitors catch on.

Microblogging offers a potential boon to inter-team communications in companies of just about any size.  By providing an easily accessible microblogging platform for the use of your team you provide a simple way for individuals and teams to provide small, manageable amounts of status information to the rest of the company in a highly consumable format that is easily understood.  In the smallest organizations, those with less than five people who all sit in a single office, this may not matter, but start adding any additional number of people or start putting those people in disparate locations and suddenly microblogging matters.

Instead of hypothesizing about microblogging out of context let’s dive right into some sample scenarios and see how microblogging for internal use can help your company.  Remember that like many social media technologies, the leading microblogging platform, Laconi.ca, is completely free and something that your IT staff can roll out for you today.

Scenario 1: The Saleman

John is a salesman.  He works for your company but is almost never in the office.  He spends his days on the road, often in other cities.  You are lucky if you have face time with John twice per month.  Several people would benefit from knowing John’s status, but John is incredibly busy and does not have time to manage any extra email traffic.  He carries a BlackBerry but only answers emails from his current and prospective clients during the day and is exhausted at night when he gets back to his hotel room.  He communicates the bare essentials to you, his boss, but allows you to provide the necessary information out to anyone in the company who might need to know what customers need or new accounts might be coming online.  This makes you both a bottleneck and a point of failure.  What if you don’t communicate the necessary information to the right people quickly enough?

The solution?  Microblogging.  If your firm had an internal microblogging platform you could have extended it to John’s BlackBerry (iPhone, Windows Mobile device, regular cell phone, whatever) so that instead of sending you a quick email John could have posted all relevant information to his own microblogging feed.  Then any interested party in your organization could look at that feed to get up to the minute data straight from the horse’s mouth rather than having it unintentionally filtered and delayed.  People who need immediate updates could be subscribed to John’s feed while people who just want casual sales updates from time to time would just visit his web page when they felt it necessary.  Everyone gets the right data at the right time and you have more time to worry about the business itself.

Scenario 2: Software Development Teams

Software development is famous for its extensive need for communication.  Developers are famous for being unable to communicate easily between individuals and between teams.  Software development often requires a great deal of granual status updates at both a team and at an individual developer or manager level.  Microblogging is hardly a panacea for this situation, but it may be a very powerful tool in the communications toolbelt for this situation.

By giving each individual developer their own internal microblogging account they can make quick and easy status updates whenever their current task changes.  Other developers, who need to know on which components work is currently being done, can just subscribe to the feeds of the appropriate developers to know what everyone is doing at the moment.  Managers can know on what each of their team members is working without needing to stop by their desks and interrupting them unnecessarily to do so.

In this model, communications happens more quickly, more thoroughly and with less disruption to staff who are extremely sensitive to disruption and task switching.  Training the developers to make regular status updates – probably just a few per day taking less than five total minutes – will take some time but once it is part of the usual workflow it will make everyone’s life much easier.  It is also a great opportunity for people to solicite and offer help on certain problems.  A developer might post “working on the foo widget and trying to figure out the bar interace” and someone subscribing to their feed might see that and, being the bar interface expert, can shoot an email or run over to their office to help them out before they waste an afternoon reinventing the wheel or looking helplessly for missing documentation.

Scenario 3: General Office Updates

Most offices are bigger than a single space in which everyone can sit down and have lunch together.  Even a relatively small business with two offices or even two home offices could likely benefit from the advantages of simple updates.  It is important for businesses to communicate.  Internal business communications is one of the ways in which companies are able to outperform individuals – by sharing knowledge and tasks between many people.  If each of those tasks is so discrete that you need no communications then you just might be better off working as individuals doing the same tasks.

By the use of microblogging even general office staff can post simple updates a few times per day so that all of the offices have a good idea of what is happening in the other locations.  Whether it is seeing when lunch or meetings are underway, when the office has left for the day, seeing what new projects or challenges have arisen or finding out what customer interactions have taken place that day that information can be used to keep the separate offices working in a unified manner rather than as two completely separate locations with a very poor understanding of what the other one is doing.

Scenario 4: Department Information

If your company is large enough to have separate departments then microblogging may be just the tool that you need to enable departmental status updates to the organization.  This is not an appropriate solution for human resources to publish their latest employee handbook updates but it could be the perfect spot for them to announce the company picnic or open enrollment for benefits.

Many departments’ core function is to supply a needed to service to the rest of the organization.  Human resources, information technology, finance, billing, purchasing, etc. all exist to service the internal business needs of the organization.  If each department had its own microblog feed then it would be easy for each of them to provide simple updates to the entire company.  People might subscribe to individual department feeds, look at the department website when they have an interest or possibly all department feeds would be aggregated onto an employee portal web page or other unified information location to make these updates obvious to everyone.

The information technology department might post a reminder about phishing attacks or social engineering dangers or could post a status update to the email system that is currently down allowing everyone to keep working without spending their time phoning the already overworked IT department and delaying them from fixing a problem on which they are already working full speed.  Purchasing might post a link to a page on new purchasing procedures that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.  Finance may send information regarding a change in the way that employees must file expenses.  Potential examples are numerous.  How often does your organization wish to make a policy or procedure change but find that informing the company of the change can be very difficult once employees have learned the old procedure.  Updating the employee handbook or financial web site do little good if people have memorized the process and no longer reference those materials.

Scenario 5: Mentoring and Employee Growth

One of the less obvious ways in which microblogging can benefit your organization is in the area of employee development.  Senior employees, while posting regular updates to their microblog feeds, provide an opportunity for more junior members of staff, especially new employees and interns, to follow their feeds in order to gain a deeper understanding into the tasks that they complete on a day to day basis.

By giving junior employees the chance to observe their “mentors” in an unobtrusive manner they may benefit from learning how they work, how their time is spent and how they prioritize their days in addition, perhaps, to learning about their interests, what relevant books or articles they have been reading, what websites are important to them and more.  This is hardly a replacement for traditional mentoring but allowing employees to seek out information about other employees that they admire or from whom they wish to learn can be very valuable.

I don’t know the specific communication needs of your business, but I would be surprised to find that it would not benefit from an increase in internal visibility.  Microblogging can facilitate communications between teams, between peers,  between managers and their staff and even between disconnected pieces of the organization.  Microblogging offers a simple, low-overhead, loosely-coupled process that allows every level of an organization to provide status and information to all interested parties within that organization.

Microblogging does, of course, offer additional benefits outside of internal status communications that we have discussed here.  Servers and other IT equipment can post alerts automatically via the microblogging architecture giving anyone interested a chance to see real time failures and alerts on the network that may affect them.  And then there is external microblogging offering status and information out to customers, vendors and interested parties outside of your organization.  But those topics are too broad for this article.

Special thanks to Andrew T. West for his help with this article.

Considering NetBooks for Small Business

There really is not any question about whether or not NetBooks will be an important tool for businesses of all sizes – they will be.  The upsides to NetBooks are too big to overlook: highly portable, generally more rugged that laptop counterparts due to size, light weight, easier to store and transport and mostly quite inexpensive compared to traditional laptops.  There are exceptions to any rule but the prototypical NetBook is dramatically smaller than a traditional laptop, weighs only one to two pounds (under a kilogram) and often costs no more than seventy percent as much as a laptop (any price comparison is massively subjective for obvious reasons.)

The question is not whether or not NetBooks are a good idea, but whether or not the NetBook market is ready for the enterprise (or, in our case, the SMB.)  While the idea of NetBooks has been around for quite some time that realization of the market has only begun to take effect within the past two years.  The NetBook was originally developed by Psion in 2000 but they exited the market in 2003.  The next big player was the United Nations with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) which was an extremely low cost, ruggedized, Linux-based NetBook available for just $199USD.  With the development of the OLPC and the ecosystem of suppliers and developers that it fostered the low-cost, portable Internet device market was set to explode.

The big news for normal consumers came in 2007 when Asus, a major Taiwanese manufacturer famous for their high-quality motherboards, released their EEE PC line of NetBooks and, later, NetTops.  The EEE PC proved to be a major hit with consumers because of its low price tag, attractice looks and size.  Once the market was identified many manufactures jumped in with top-tier manufacturers like Acer, Lenovo, Dell and HP finally in the market now as well albeit generally from their consumer divisions and not from their commercial divisions.

Today we are in a rapidly maturing consumer NetBook market.  This means that NetBooks are well established, widely available and stable but, thus far, only in configurations designed for consumer use.  This presents our first barrier when considering these devices for the workplace.

With only rare exception, NetBooks ship with either consumer versions of Microsoft Windows (i.e. XP Home, Vista Home) or with non-enterprise versions of Linux (i.e. Linpus, Mandriva.)  To be sure, there are a few machines that ship with appropriately enterprise class operating systems like Vista Business or SUSE Linux but mostly the operating system that you find on the NetBooks are not the same as you would require in your business.  (Many niche NetBook manufactures do ship with Ubuntu or Fedora which are acceptable to many businesses but these are rare as well.)

In some cases, such as the very popular Acer Aspire One, it is quite easy for an IT department to establish their own operating system image and to apply it to the NetBook.  This is hardly a cost effective approach for a small shop to take, however.  This is only an effective approach under very specific circumstances or for very large orgazations who will be rolling out a large number of identically imaged machines and can spread the cost out over the group.

In the case of the Acer Aspire One we have a very well built unit that runs either Linpus Linux (a derivative of Fedora 8) or Windows XP Home.  Windows Home editions are not able to be integrated into business environments so we can rule out that option completely.  The cost of obtaining an additional XP Pro license would be very prohibitive on hardware that is so inexpensive.

The Linpus model is significantly less expensive than the Windows XP Home model and can be outfitted with a custom build of Fedora 10 replacing the including system at no additional external expense.  This does require a rather knowledgable Linux engineer to do and takes many hours to perfect and test.  Most likely a few days of labor at a minimum.  Only large shops with good internal Linux expertise or smaller shops with IT outsourcing partners with the necessary expertise should attempt to go down this path as it leaves you completely without any form of vendor support.  It also requires your IT department to monitor and support an additional operating system image unless you have already standardized on Fedora – which is not very common.  There are other options, such as installing OpenSUSE or an Ubuntu variant but these require additional work as Fedora is used to create the Linpus base and installs so easily onto the device.

Using Linux-based NetBooks often presents another problem.  On a normal corporate desktop running Linux it is most common to find either KDE or Gnome running as the desktop.  These are the two most popular, full featured desktop environments for the UNIX platforms and, to most users, it is the choice of KDE or Gnome that establishes the familiarity with the environment and not the underlying operating system.  Because of this, users who have used KDE on SUSE Linux can often be switched to KDE on PC-BSD without the user even realizing that the operating system has changed (Linux to FreeBSD.)  But NetBooks are often underpowered when it comes to running these heavy desktops and so alternatives are generally recommended.  Most commonly today we see XFCE chosen as a lightweight desktop environment alternative but even lighter options exist such as IceWM.  These environments can make NetBooks very usable instead of being slow and cumbersome but they do cause users to face potentially unfamiliar interfaces that can lead to additional support needs and possibly even training.

Having NetBooks available for a certain class of highly mobile or continuously on-call personnel can make a lot of sense.  The advantages are very real and, while some users are put off by the small screens and keyboards and dislike the lack of high-performance hardware, many users adore the portability and easy of use of these small devices.  If having a NetBook makes the difference between staff being able to work or having to disconnect from the office then the NetBooks will easily pay for themselves.

For most businesses I feel that we are still in a phase of early-adoption when it comes to NetBooks.  The hardware itself is well tested and widely available but the software is mostly not ready at this time.  In the next two years I expect that we will see a lot of advances in the market, especially as AMD and NVidia are expected to begin entering the market in force during this time allow with other potential players who currently have had very little input to the market such as Freescale.

Currently, and for the near future, businesses looking to NetBooks need to almost across the board make a commitment to using Linux rather than Windows.  The Windows operating system is just not ready to handle the NetBook market and will likely wait until NetBooks catch up to modern laptops in performance before really looking to enter the enterprise NetBook market.  During the mean time, however, alternative architectures, such as PowerPC, ARM and MIPS, are being experimented with within the market and their adoption poses a technological barrier to running Windows on these devices.  Microsoft may find that the NetBook could be a critical loss of market for them as Linux vendors like Novell, Red Hat and Canonical will see it as an inroad into the enterprise desktop space.  It is not coincidence that Red Hat has just announced its official return to competiting in this market.

At this particular time I feel that it is good to begin investigating NetBooks and seeing how they may or may not fit into your business IT strategy.  Most small businesses will find, like their large enterprise cousins, that the NetBook is inexpensive to obtain but expensive to support in a corporate environment.  This will be changing rapidly as the NetBook format becomes more common and business begin to clamour more and more to get these provided, in business-ready configurations, from the top vendors.

Free Web Reporting with Google Analytics

As a small business it can often be a challenge to obtain deep insight into the workings of your information technology organization.  When it comes to web sites there have always been a number of decent, free tools that would do the job adequately, such as Webalizer.  But these tools require some level of additional setup and expertise which means either more time being spent on your own attempting to learn and manage another IT skill or paying your IT staff to do so.  Today we have another option.

Google offers a great, free product available online called Google Analytics.  Analytics is a complete website tracking package that sends all of its data to the Google Analytics website where you can view your statistics online or have a report emailed to yourself automatically at set intervals.  Google handles all of the code, storage and reporting involved in keeping tabs on your company’s websites making your job very easy and allowing you to focus on your business rather than your technology needs.

The system works very simply.  After signing up with Google as an Analytics user you go through a very simple process of adding a web site to be monitored to your account and then Google generates a small snippet of JavaScript code which you then need to copy and paste into the code of your website.  This works for multi-page sites and with most content management systems such as WordPress – although for a CMS you will need to check your CMS documentation to know exactly where to place the code.

Obviously it will take a little while for Analytics to begin collecting the data that it needs in order to generate reports for you.  After a day or so you should begin to see the reports in action, although it takes a month or more before the data that is collected will really begin being valuable to you.  Some of the most important data obtained from a web site is changes in your readership over time to alert you to when you are doing things right or doing them wrong for your market.

Google Analytics collects and collates a lot of useful information for you.  You can see breakdowns of which pages are drawing readers and which are turning them away.  You can see what search terms readers are using to find your site.  Analytics also provides a very nice map report that allows you to see your readership from around the world.

Using Google Analytics you can find out more about the users that your site is attracting and you can learn how they are using your site.  By obtaining this data you can learn how you can better reach you intended customer base or learn more about your existing customers.  It can also teach you what information on your site users are able to find and what process they are using to reach that information.  A tool like Google Analytics or Webalizer is a critical first step in making your web sites work for you.

Visit Google Analytics’s Features Page to learn more about the features available from this product.