Alan Porter’s presentation at the Central Texas DITA User Group meeting talked about Quadralay’s use of wikis internally and their external wiki at wiki.webworks.com.
They have four wikis in operation right now, with one more to come. Back in 2003, they started their first wiki for the development team. Their company is a small one, based in Austin, and they now have absolutely every employee (with the exception of one person) having contributed to the wiki at some point or another. Currently, with their staff of 15 people, half of them contribute several times a week.
They held a brown bag training session for the whole company when a wiki for the company came out, to help people get comfortable with editing.
At their WebWorks RoundUp user forum last year, they demonstrated a proof of concept that they could take a mix of FrameMaker, DITA-XML and Word source and turn it into wiki text. I was at the demo and it has such a nice “cool” factor even if it was a simple Proof of Concept (PoC).
Another case study – they use their wiki to communicate with clients and customers on the bid and contract process, and people say it makes things go so smoothly with great communication. They use the very secure MoinMoin wiki engine and it is locked down with tight controls.
The WebWorks Services wiki:
- used to create and track task tickets
- offers single point of contact
- facilitates interaction between customers and engineers
- gives a timeline for edits on a page
- gives them milestones and percent completion
In the next six months or so, they’re planning on a new doc site, docs.webworks.com (not yet live) to be authored in DITA using structured FrameMaker, then published to wikitext using WebWorks.