Blog
How we Wiki
by Ben on Tuesday, November 28, 2006
One of the big changes that we have made over the last year or so is the way that we communicate with our clients. One of the big challenges is to avoid drowning in the tidal wave of information that comes with a typical web project. There are literally thousands of ideas, meeting notes, concepts and diagrams continually popping up, and they’re tough to keep abreast of.
To do this, we use a type of software called a Wiki. A Wiki is what you’d get if you had a virtual cocktail blender and mixed Word with a Blog and then threw in a Content Management System. And yes, Wiki like in Wikipedia.
But we use our Wiki in a slightly different way. Rather than just a receptacle for information, we use it to store meeting notes, brainstorms, wireframes, snippets of code, and even present visual designs. The aim is to try to get as much information on each project written down. By doing this, we’ve found that our Wiki has become our main interface with customers – a kind of a mixture of intranet and extranet.
The actual software we use is called Confluence, which is made by Atlassian. They did an interview with us as part of a customer case study:
“We tried a number of different approaches, and looking back they were all based on a central editing model. A wiki made sense because we wanted everyone to be able to contribute and participate. It is also closer to the way that we like to work with our customers. By allowing everyone to be able to add and reshape content, more people became involved. We moved from one person slaving away creating pages and the rest of us having to wait for them, to a situation where one person gets the ball rolling, and then other people can join in to complete the task.”
“Say, for instance, we’ve created a design and need to show it to our client. First, a designer makes a page, attaches an image, and they’re done with their part. But then I might look at it and realise that it needs a bit more explanation, or a link to a wireframe diagram to give context. One of our developers might have also mocked up how a menu works, and so they stick in a link to that. Our client might email the link around, and then add some comments on the page. This kind of collaborative workflow is one of our strengths, and it is really important for us to be able to add these various types of content easily.”
You can read more here.
You wish you were here… / shiftperception.006 blog » A brave new world of OS Says:
[...] It’s not so crazy, when you think about it - at least for the average home user. What do we really use at home anyway? Email, photos, basic word docs, spreadsheets, and movie/game playback. Don’t know how it would work with big business, but by using tools like Confluence (which we use at Red Ant), and free web-based blog software like WordPress, the shift to the online documentation of process has begun in earnest. [...]
Fri Dec 01 12:38:18 UTC 2006
Aden Hepburn Says:
Sign me up for the wiki. Love they way you work to use it. We've been looking at a similar thing... Perhaps problem solved.
Thu Feb 07 13:48:32 UTC 2008
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Thu Mar 20 13:30:25 UTC 2008