Download Introducing TWiki

Introducing TWiki
Intranet Collaboration For Everyone
<Your Name>
http://your-twiki-server/
Introduction
• TWiki is a web based collaboration tool, tailored for
distributed organisations
• Not just intranet publishing!
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Collaboration tool for discussions
Web applications (form-filling, structured data)
Personal home pages, info, bookmarks
Sync to laptops and Palm devices
• Highly suitable for knowledge-intensive companies:
– Replicate accurate knowledge to everyone - anyone can
contribute, remote offices are on same playing field
– Push and pull – changes by email, or browse/search
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Challenges of Distributed Teams
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How to get a virtual team working together?
Conference calls & visits
Shared drives
E-mail
• Documents get lost, can’t search shared email space
• Internal newsgroups
• Great for discussion, but … not easy to search, hard to
find ‘final consensus’ of a thread
• Intranet sites
• Hard to update, ‘one webmaster’ syndrome
• Special tools and knowledge required
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What is a Wiki?
• WikiWiki = The Writeable Web
– As quick to contribute as email,
as easy to use as a website
• Original WikiWiki implemented in 1995 using
Perl:
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Every page can be edited, using just a browser
No need to learn HTML
Easy to link pages using WikiWords
List of recent changes, simple searching
• TWiki is a powerful ‘Wiki Clone’ for intranets
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Selected Companies using TWiki
3Com
AMD
Alcatel
Amazon.com
Analog Devices Inc.
Aspen Technology
AT&T
Bank One
BellSouth.COM
Boeing
Carrier Corporation
Chevron Phillips Chemical
CNN
Compaq
Disney Internet Group
DoD, The National Guard
DoubleClick
Ericsson
FedEx
Ford Motor Co.
GE
General Dynamics
General Motors
GTE
Hostway Corporation
IBM
Intel
Lockheed-Martin
LSI Logic
Lucent
Matsushita Electrical Co.
Micron Technology
Motorola
NASA
National Semiconductor
Network Associates
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New York Times, The
Nokia
Northrop Grumman
O'Reilly Network
QNX Software Systems
Peregrine
Philips
Raytheon Company
Red Hat Europe
SAP
Siemens
Sun Microsystems
SuSE
Texas Instruments
Unisys
US Government
WebMD
Wind River
Xerox
Goals for TWiki at YourCompany
• Improve knowledge flow (esp. remote offices)
• More accurate information
– Revise information until it’s correct
– Keep information up-to-date – low overhead
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Easy to start sharing knowledge
Spend less time emailing & in meetings
Get more people involved
Quickly see who contributed information
Central, searchable repository
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How to use TWiki
• Use for knowledge capture about product and
technology
• Avoid overlap with other tools and processes
– <Customise this as necessary!>
– Don’t use to document Quality processes etc.
– Don’t duplicate official documents
• Good for rapid updates between document revisions, can feed
into official documents
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TWiki Implementation
• Runs on <YourOS> server (http://your-twikiserver/)
– <Say that it’s backed up>
• Open Source, written in Perl
– Saves thousands of <YourCurrency> in software costs
– Customisation
• <your customisations, e.g. InterWiki links, or plans>
– Rapid development
• Templates, access control, web applications, easier linking, …
– Plugin architecture
• Drawing, action tracking, voting, calendars, …
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TWiki Issues
• ‘Don’t Touch’ syndrome
– looks like a ‘proper website’
– ‘better not touch it, so-and-so owns that page’
• ‘Unofficial’ syndrome
– <YourCompany status goes here – emphasise any
official support, and that server is backed up>
• Not always connected to intranet
– Can easily sync onto laptops and PDAs
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TWiki Issues
• Time required to contribute
– Save time by doing less email, and finding critical info
quicker
– Save time by responding to FAQs with link to Twiki
– Learn new technology by taking notes on TWiki
– Keep useful URLs in TWiki – notes, ‘magnetic pages’
• TWiki syntax
– use the help pages, doesn’t take long to learn
• Forgetting passwords – use IE5 to store password
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TWiki Issues
• Email Habit: It takes time to get used to
collaborating the TWiki way. "I prefer e-mail“
– Email doesn’t scale – new people, new technology,
new customers, new partners, …
– Getting the right information to right person -> happier
customers
• Ownership: Shared knowledge vs. ‘Owners’
"I don’t want to edit someone else’s page“
– Wiki culture: nobody ‘owns’ pages, and any change can
be built upon.
– First person to create page is not the owner!
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Highlights: WikiWords for Linking
• Easy to create hyperlinks within TWiki pages
– Just use a WikiWord
• WikiWords are capitalized words, run together,
e.g. SmartCompanies, IntranetTools
• To create a new link, type:
– For more info, see IntranetTools.
• If the ‘IntranetTools’ page exists, it is turned
into a link:
– For more info, see IntranetTools.
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Highlights: Creating New Pages
• First, type in some text including WikiWord for new
page
– For more info, see IntranetTools?.
• The ‘?’ is a link (to a page that doesn’t yet exist).
• Now, to create the IntranetTools page, click on this
link, type in some text, then hit Preview and Save.
– If you return to original page and hit Refresh, the link
now covers the whole WikiWord:
– For more info, see IntranetTools.
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Highlights: Version Control
• Pages are under version control:
– See previous page revisions.
• click on the r1.4 type links at bottom of page
– See differences between revisions.
• click on the Diffs link at bottom of page
– See who changed what and when.
• ‘Soft Security’ – anyone can change anything, but
changes are logged
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Highlights: Access Control
• Define groups and set access restrictions to webs
based on these groups
• Example TWikiAdminGroup page:
• Set GROUP = PeterThoeny, PaulReiber
• Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = TWikiAdminGroup
• Default – use Soft Security
• Special applications – use Access Control
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TWiki Webs at <YourCompany>
• Each ‘Web’ has its own set of pages (topics)
– Pages have unique names within a Web
• Main – entry point for http://your-twiki-server/
– personal home pages, etc.
• <Your Webs go here>
• TWiki – documentation, tutorials
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Resources for Learning TWiki
• 20 minutes to learn TWiki essentials and start
sharing knowledge!
• Click Help link at top of any page
– check TextFormattingRules while editing a page
– find local enhancements in WikiEditing
– follow the TWikiTutorial (optional)
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Summary
• TWiki is a powerful tool for intranet-based
collaboration
• Easy to share your knowledge as web pages
• Searchable and browseable, even offline
• Growing knowledge base
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