Finally a Wiki where Articles are Fully Managed Content
Wiki’s are one of the most mentioned Enterprise 2.0 tools. Most (dare I say all?) E20 vendors have one or incorporate one into their solution stack. However, if you look more closely, many of them simply roll in some open source wiki server and call it a day. While basic functionality for wikis is almost standard these days, the information architecture underpinning the wiki is often overlooked. What happens is that the “wiki-widget” proponents end up sacrificing information availability for information presentability. The “we’ve got a wiki too” crowd is so caught up in achieving buzz-word parity that the real benefits of a fully managed and integrated wiki solution are passed over. The result is a loose hodge-podge of stand alone “web 2.0” widgets that have been lumped together with a common user interface thrown on top. The vendors call it good.
Portal vendors are some of the worst offenders here. The ease with which widgets are surfaced in a single common UI lends itself to lazy integration. In these kinds of environments the wiki widget may appear next to the JCR enabled content repository but there is NEVER ANY LINKAGE BETWEEN THE TWO!
Seriously, WTF??? If enterprise Wikis are the best place for enterprise knowledge bases, best practices and employee generated tips and tricks (AND THEY OFTEN ARE!), then what in the world is any enterprise information architect worth his or her pay grade doing being happy with throwing key corporate knowledge assets into its own walled off database silo? The answer is that most are happy with the loose “on the glass” integration provided by a portal or creative use of iFrames. This is a tragedy and a terrible mis / under use of corporate knowledge assets. Fortunately, Fishbowl Solutions has developed a fully ECM integrated wiki that combines all the latest wiki features with the power of Oracle Enterprise Content Management.
Edit in Context, Search within Section, Update Metadata and REUSE Content Articles ANYWHERE!
Because wikis allow for easy end user access, capture and preservation of institutional knowledge they are fantastic tools for any number of applications. From call centers to support desks to sales force automation and project management and product documentation they provide an easy way to navigate to, find and consume information. The best part is that they capture what makes YOUR business different from your competitors and socializes those differentiators among the rest of your employees. Fishbowl Solutions Wiki is built with that end user in mind. So the system is incredibly easy to use. It allows for both in context editing as well as document uploading, remote posting and even posting from your mobile device like an iPad.
But the best part is that it is built around a solid information architecture. With Oracle’s UCM (Universal Content Management) server under the hood, the articles, documents, images, tags and metadata are fully managed assets. This means that you don’t need separate security models for your wiki and your content store, or even worse, some kind of spaghetti integration to map security attributes from one system to another. This also means that you can single-source your information.
Think about product documentation. Your customers want product documentation so you have it available for search or download on your website. But your engineers and developers need product documentation too because they use it as a reference. So WHY IN THE WORLD would you have it twice in two places (or more!)? Why not have it once and surface it on your WCM website for your customers and surface it inside your internal Wiki for your dev teams? That’s what the Fishbowl Wiki allows you to do. Now, if you’re an E20 smarty-pants you’re thinking, but what about all those user created edits? I don’t want my dev team’s additions to be public. Good thought, but you are forgetting about the power of the single-source security model. If your internal teams make edits they are associated with an internal only security group and only show up for your internal teams. External users see only pristine documentation. Single Sourced power, Multi – Channel Delivery.
We rely on standard Oracle information architecture to delivery a compelling and simple user experience without dumbing-down the features and capabilities. Got a portal? No problem, simply surface the Fishbowl Wiki in the portal with our Portal Integration Suite. Because the wiki is built on Oracle UCM, managed with WCM features and integrated into the Oracle information management stack, you don’t sacrifice information availability for presentability like other wikis force you to.
Fishbowl Collab Wiki with Collaboration Manager Driven Navigation as well as Content and Wiki Article Listings and Access
Finally, because we’ve designed our Fishbowl Wiki product this way, we are able to easily(!) incorporate it into other Oracle ECM
All Project Team Members Can Share and Collaborate With Confidence that All Content is Stored in an Enterprise Scale ECM System
modules. For instance, it can be combined with the Oracle UCM Collaboration Manger to provide a project wiki where all the wiki content is associated with project collaboration content while navigation is governed by your project access. Now your project teams, including external client teams can share not just documents but also wiki based articles, schedules, status updates and messages.
The vital innovation here is not that Fishbowl Solutions has a wiki product. Like I started off saying, wikis are among the most widely touted E20 tools out there. But you must ask yourself and your E20 widget sales rep, “what is the point of a cool E20 wiki if I cannot get to any of the information outside of the wiki?” If governance or compliance was holding you back before, you can breath easy now. With the Fishbowl Wiki your internal knowledge and articles are protected, managed and secured. But you don’t have to sacrifice a great user experience to comply with regulations. You don’t have to forgo the latest best practices or rely on antiquated delivery models to get information out to employees, partners and project teams. You don’t have to pay outrageous sums to “integrate” silo’d wiki data with the rest of your internal knowledge centers. What you do need to do is reach out to Fishbowl Solutions to ask for a demo and see how this can help you. We can be reached at [email protected]
