What intranet CMS’s can learn from wikis
Categorised under: Content management, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
The “Wiki Way” is getting some traction at the moment, and it’s often positioned as the replacement for “old fashioned” methods of publishing. In particular, wiki advocates target the limitations and failures of web content management systems, the tools most often used to publish and manage corporate intranets.
Now, wikis are not a silver bullet to our information and content management challenges, and I have argued that a wiki as an intranet is an intranet. That being said, I think content management vendors and intranet teams can learn from wiki products, and can make some simple changes to improve outcomes:
- Intranets were never meant to be updated by just a core group of publishers. Instead, the goal was always to have the “business own their own content”. Wikis should remind intranet teams that having broad engagement in the intranet is necessary for success.
- Intranets, regardless of the publishing tool used, should have a “edit this page” button available everywhere. Staff should then be provided with a simple front-end interface for updating content, without the hassles and complexities all too often imposed by CMS products.
- Workflow should then be turned off for most areas of the intranet (as workflow doesn’t work). Instead, like wikis, there should be universal versioning and a focus on quickly updating content rather than trying to “get it right” before publishing.
- The focus should be on accountability and transparency, rather than security.
- The bottom-up ease of creating new pages in wikis should also be replicated by intranet teams. While wiki advocates fail to look beyond initial organic growth, they can achieve much greater levels of involvement from staff.
- Perhaps most broadly, intranet teams should aim to generate the same culture of content that wikis can achieve. That is, the sense of community and personal involvement in content, rather than the “intranet as corporate repository”.
At the end of the day, I don’t care about the publishing tools that underpin the intranet, as long as they work and are used appropriately. I am also not arguing for throwing away our intranets and replacing them with wikis. That would be naive.
It is, however, a good time to take a fresh look at how we manage and grow our intranets, and to learn lessons from the wider community.
Thoughts, comments?
Tags: cms, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, versioning, wikis, workflow
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
4 Comments:
I agree with your points. In the trenches, the most difficult thing is convincing management to give up control – that a wiki-like intranet does not lead to:
* general chaos and time-wasting
* diluting of “official” content with commentary and “non-official” points of view
In my experience, the bits of the intranet that we did free up for general authorship became much better used and rarely required moderator intervention.
Certainly, lowering or giving up control will lead to more participation. On the other hand, I think it’s necessary to train participants on an intranet extensively.
We are currently giving courses to people how to use intranet, and then give them selfcontrol on the “staging” environment (which is sort of a test environment).
They give us a sign, we check if it looks nice and then publish to live, which is the environment where everyone can see it.
But educating the people about the intranet is necessary, otherwise it will be a mess in no time unfortunately.
The key thing for me is this: not all content needs to be of equal content. Both intranets and wikis need to recognise this.
There is core/important content that *must* be right, and of high quality. This should be published by trained authors, and maybe even reviewed.
As you get further away from the “centre”, the need for quality drops. At the outer edge, there’s content that we really don’t care about at all, because usage is too local, or it’s not accessed frequently enough.
So there’s space (and a need) for all authoring models, from tight control to loose publishing.
Great points!
When we created the latest revision of umbraco (an open source ASP.NET Web CMS), we were very inspired by the wiki editing process, especially the idea of editing in context rather than in a back office tool.
So we found a great user-friendly way (at least we like to think so
) to combine the ease of existing editor controls – which means that you don’t need to learn a new syntax – with the in-context wiki paradigm and still and ended up with something called LiveEditing.
The feature is shown in this podcast featuring a very enthusiastic dev team:
http://umbraco.org/blog/2008/8/30/podcast-7—the-live-editing-progress
Thoughts?
btw: I think a lot of us will be missing points like these at jboye08 :’-(
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