ThoughtFarmer is a finalist for Intranet Journal’s Product of the Year in the “Document Management / Collaboration Product” category. Other finalists are:
If you’re a ThoughtFarmer fan, please put in a vote for us!
Prior to a company-wide deployment of a new wiki intranet, many companies conduct a pilot to an initial group of users. Here are a few suggestions on making that pilot a success.
Size: Don’t make your pilot too big, or it will become as big a job as launching to the whole company. But don’t make it too small, either: You need enough people adding content to make it interesting. 20 to 50 people is probably good.
Attitude: Choose keeners — people who aren’t afraid to try new things or to use new technology. Choose people that will be enthusiastic about the potential for open collaboration at your company.
Seniority: Try to get one or more people from the senior team to actively participate in the pilot. If they set the example, the rest of the pilot group will be more likely to actively participate and view the pilot as important.
Blank slate = bad. No one knows what to do with a blank wiki. So set yours up with a basic navigation structure.
Sample top-level navigation structure:
You might also try building out the information structure underneath some of the top-level items:
Departments
- Finance
- HR
- IT
- R&D
- Sales & Marketing
Caution: Be careful not to be too granular in the way you define the initial information structure, or your wiki might seem too restrictive. It’s easy to move pages if you need to subdivide or rearrange sections in the future.
Users learn by example. If users see lots of examples of how others have populated content, they find it easy to imitate. Wikis are generally easy to use — as long as users see that something is possible, they can usually figure out how to do it on their own.
Users. User profiles are a central part of any intranet. Populate them with an initial import from your directory system, importing as much data as you have available.
Barnraising. You can populate a whack of content in a single day. Try getting 4 or 5 people together for an all-day barnraising.
Give users a reason to return. In the early stages of the pilot, make sure there’s something new on the home page every single day. News items, polls or the cafeteria lunch menu work well for this.
Email notifications: Many wiki systems can send you an email when someone responds to your comment or edits a page you’ve created. Make sure these notifications are enabled — they keep online conversations flowing and drive repeat traffic to the wiki.
Alternatively, you can rely on RSS feeds for these notifications. But RSS may still be poorly used or understood by many people in your pilot group.
Give your pilot group something specific to accomplish with your wiki. Ideas:
Promote. Prior to the pilot, send several email communications to your pilot group to get them excited about participating.
Launch. Have an event to launch the pilot. If you’re in a single office, reserve a boardroom, do a short demo, assign tasks, and eat some doughnuts. If you’re in several offices, launch via a web conference.
Follow up. Schedule group or individual follow-up meetings for the week following the pilot launch. See how users are doing with their tasks, and answer their questions. A weekly or biweekly group meeting to review progress will help keep things moving along.
WikiPatterns is full of great suggestions on helping a wiki succeed in a corporate environment.
I’m making my semi-annual pilgrimage to London this weekend.
I’ll be visiting current and potential ThoughtFarmer clients as well as social software consultants. Schedule:
* Monday, Nov 19: London
* Tuesday, Nov 20: London
* Wednesday, Nov 21: Dublin
* Thursday, Nov 22: London
Are you a social software consultant? Let’s do coffee. Shoot me a note at cmcgrath@thoughtfarmer.com.
In his seminal article on Enterprise 2.0, professor Andrew McAfee lays out the six components of next-generation enterprise collaboration platforms:
S - Search
L - Links
A - Authoring
T - Tags
E - Extensions
S - Signals
How does ThoughtFarmer, my soon-to-be-world-famous wiki intranet system, stack up?
“Users are increasingly bypassing [navigation] in favor of keyword searches.”
ThoughtFarmer has a fast, accurate, configurable search engine.
“Links are an excellent guide to what’s important… Many people have to be given the ability to build links.”
All ThoughtFarmer users can easily embed links in text, or even create directories of links.
“When authoring tools are deployed… the intranet shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many.”
All ThoughtFarmer users can create and edit content with a few clicks.
“[Folksonomies] reflect the information structures and relationships that people actually use, instead of the ones that were planned for them in advance.”
All ThoughtFarmer users can apply tags to pages and documents.
“Moderately ’smart’ computers take tagging one step further by automating some of the work of categorization and pattern matching.”
ThoughtFarmer tagging enables faceted browsing — quickly mine through lists of thousands of pages by progressively applying tags.
“The final element of the SLATES infrastructure is technology to signal users when new content of interest appears.”
ThoughtFarmer alerts you to new content via RSS or email notifications.
ThoughtFarmer is 100% SLATES-compliant.
But is it FLATNESSES-compliant? I’ll address this in a future blog post.
Watch me be all hyped and nervous while demoing the latest version of ThoughtFarmer at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.
I’ve been to London to visit the Queen.
Okay, I didn’t visit the Queen, but I saw the Thames, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, The Eye, Notting Hill, Big Ben, and the Gherkin. More importantly, I met with Euan Semple, Headshift, the Strange Attractors and NESTA (our latest ThoughtFarmer client).
Gord took all the pictures — see his Flickr photoset ThoughtFarmer Goes to London.
I launched my first software product with my partner on Monday. It’s called ThoughtFarmer, and it’s a Microsoft-based wiki software product for intranets. Check out the site: www.thoughtfarmer.com.
From Forrester Research: IT’s inability to market effectively cements its cost center role in the enterprise: communicating status but not value, fulfilling requests but not solving problems, and partially deploying technologies but not delivering expected results. IT organizations need to embrace the concepts, terminology, and process of marketing — creating marketing plans, executing campaigns, and boosting brand equity. The result will be delivery of the right projects for the right audience, accelerated time to benefit, and increased trust of the IT organization. The firms that embrace the marketing of IT first will be those with customer-facing technology, shared services, and strong process discipline.
I just had my first can of Red Bull energy drink. My sleeps have been lousy because of sick kids, but I need to stay up tonight to jam on a strategy I’m presenting tomorrow. Well guess what, Red Bull works. I’m so wired I don’t know if I’ll sleep til Friday. What is this 1000mg of tourine, anyway? Every heard of glucuronolactone? Ah, caffeine, I know what that is. How ’bout pantothenic acid? Why is there a warning that pregnant women shouldn’t drink this? Should I have a guilty conscience?
My wife’s mother’s cousin’s daughter designs beautiful wedding cakes for a living, and she asked me to build her a web site. So I procrastinated for about 6 months, and then I put this together: cakesbymeg.com. Most of the web projects I work on involve a dozen stakeholders and tens of thousands of lines of code, so it’s a pleasure to work up a small, simple web site for an appreciative customer. Of course, there’s not a lot of money in web sites for relatives.
