Korean Job Discussion Forums

[simone]

Hi. At my company, we sell a really big (and expensive) product which is always custom made, with long decision periods, doing a lot of work over months, after which we may or may not even get the deal.

Because on my team there are often 3 or 4 people sending info to 3 or 4 people at the target customer company, I think some kind of password protected private wiki might be a good way to keep everyone on the same page.

We waste a lot of time sending and resending documents to reflect updates, and often, people don�t get or �didn�t see� the differences.

I�ve done some basic research, and there are tons of places out there, but security is important� I want to do one as an experiment to demonstrate how useful they can be before I try to get budget allocated for it.

Does anyone have any experience or recommendations in selecting/using wikis?

[splok]

I've been thinking of setting up a project with Tikiwiki, but I haven't actually tried it yet.

http://tikiwiki.org/

It seems pretty stacked with features, but it sounds like something pretty simple might work for you since you're only dealing with a small number of users. If you don't want to deal with hosting and installing a software package just for this, you could check out Google Docs.

http://docs.google.com/

It lets you make and store documents online, and then you can share them with people who you invite.

Also, here's a comparison of wiki software from where else:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

[The King of Kwangju]

If security is important it would probably be best to set it up on your own server and password-protect it. This would also look more professional in the eyes of your clients.

Having gone down this road in a large corporation, I can tell you that the key to its success will be getting contributions from your co-workers. It's tempting to "sell" Wikipedia, but that has a million people updating it. If no one updates yours, it is useless.

The technology is simple and free. It's not the issue.

#1 in your budget should be allocating paid work hours of knowledgeable employees to feed the wiki. The hours can taper off over time but they should be ongoing. Get any or all managers to understand what it is, and what you're doing, and get buy-in.

The only way for it to succeed is to get your bosses to value it, and to allocate resources to keep it full of relevant information.

[simone]

Actually, for my scale, I think google docs may be the way to go. Later we can move to something more secure.

I just wish there were some way we could make a document "permanently unpublishable", so that it would require votes from all the people using it (or something like that) in order to publish it. At this point, I'm not worried about it, because there's no way the client would want it published right now.

I've found here that "nothing succeeds like success", and I already have one client with uses gmail to communicate with me. It's crunch time with her next week, so today I'll create a file of all the key data and get it to her.

I'm the only waeg here in 200 people, and the only area in which I'm in actual control of anything is "International Marketing" which is largely undefined. I've already met considerable resistance when I try to improve anything operational outside my "direct area of control". I'll give this a try and then, all it'll take is a positive review from the client and it'll become standard on all new prospects.

[simone]

So far so good!

The client likes it, and my team instantly "got it". It was like the battle at the start of a game of risk - I'm purple - Sue is blue... Sure, it'll track changes anyway, but it's helpful sometimes to have general ownership of a colour.

On another note, today we got confirmation of my first real sale... They're signing the contract next week... Basic package will be in the range of 3.5 OK won. Damn I wish I made commission.

Happy day.