Content Management: Wikis within the Enterprise

A few years have passed since Infoworld declared 2004 to be the year of the enterprise wiki.  While still not yet commonplace, wikis are becoming an ever more popular collaborative tool used in the workplace. 

What are wikis?  Unlike static web pages that are created to be one-way read-only web documents, wikis are designed to allow users to contribute to the content of the web document.

Users contribute to the wiki by being able to modify the text and relational hyperlinks on the page.  Many wiki tools provide built-in visual WYSIWIG editing tools so that users need not understand wikitext syntax.  Wikitext syntax is not standardized and varies across the different wiki engines. 

Any edits made to the document are captured and recorded as part of the document history.  The information captured as part of the history can be very detailed, including the author, a timestamp and a detailed description of the exact lines of the document text that have been modified.  The history can be used as an audit log of all activities associated with the wiki page.

Using the wiki ‘Revision History’ feature, it is possible to roll back a wiki page to a previous version.  And a diff feature allows you to visually compare changes that have been made to the page.

Wikis are particularly useful in a collaborative environment and can be used as a sort of bi-directional portal for tracking projects. Project status and updates, requirements, plans, schedules and reports can all be easily aggregated at a single point for everyone on the team to access.  A project wiki can also reduce the need for many project-related emails.  The wiki becomes the authorative location to look for finding the most up-to-date information.

Clearly there is a lot of overlap in what a wiki does and features of a traditional enterprise content management system.  What’s the difference?  Wikis, in their emphasis of ease of use, tend to be more light weight.  The data model also tends to not be as robust as that of an ECM system.  Wikis also typically lack tools for effectively specifying granular security. 

When a wiki page is ‘completed’, there may be a desire to archive the document.  Capturing a wiki document composed of many hyperlinks for archival is not necessarily straight forward, but some, or part of the document could be captured and archived as a single entity within an ECM system.  But once archived, if the document can’t be easily viewed within the wiki framework, it may not be of much use.

A loose level of integration between the ECM and wiki systems is not totally satisfying.   Some vendors, like Stellent (to be acquired by Oracle), have tried to more tightly merge the two worlds of ECM and wikis, but, in general, it seems that most vendors have yet to address wiki information in their product strategies.