http://jinsync.com/?q=node/9

But I can’t follow the previous comments about managing your small business backoffice using a wiki.

Being a grateful user of open source software (the packages we sell reuse Mozilla and Tomcat), I must confess we tried many solutions before deciding to move our project management intranet to… Google Apps (sigh!)

Have a look at our checklist, they have most of it :
- Online spreadsheet, calendars, timesheet, with public, company and private access rights granularity (full support)
- Wysiwyg edition of documents like briefings, design, test reports, etc, that anyone can export to meaningful desktop format (full support).
- Changing prioritization of projects and tasks (no support).

IMHO, regarding project management, Wikis are lacking of those basics.

Of course, Google Apps won’t let you solve the core management task of a project-oriented company working on microprojects (projects of an average duration of 10 mandays): enter data in context and and change priorities.

For what we know, such a a flexible operations software for small project-oriented companies is still missing.

We’ve been reviewing and/or trying the following options :
- Wiki’s.
- Several bug tracking/issue tracking packages.
- Trac.
- Microsoft Project.
- Ketura.
- Custom development with Filemaker/Access.
- etc…

Those solutions are useless. The problem is in the core of the functionality : prioritization and contextual data entry.

First, regarding data entry, the picture is poor : you can generally edit one record at a time. This makes impossible to balance your decisions with the rest of the project and of the agenda, and you find yourself infinitely switching between tables (for making decisions) and forms (to write them down).

Moreover, in order to manage the coherence of the relational data, those solutions won’t let you add a single thing (subtask, work amount, material) that is not tangled to previously defined records in two or three tables.

Consequence : when Dude calls you up to say “There is a problem on te package. I’ll need my friend Doe, the guy I told you about the other day, to help me four hours this afternoon, may I have him ?”, you’re with 15min work before you write the data (create subtask, allocate subtask to task, create Doe, allocate Doe to team, allocate Doe to task, define Dude as project manager, send emails to everybody) and say “OK Dude, go on!”.

This probably makes sense in a big vendor’s backoffice, but not for us.

With our Google Apps system, we just say: “OK Dude, go on, I’ve put a line for Doe in the project sheet, could you please be so kind to tell me what Doe will ask for a price on that one?”

Regarding prioritization, PM packages are terrible : there is no support for changing prioritisation of projects other than changing the data in all the aggregated tasks. It is really difficult to define priorities that don’t match the default rules of the software.

And anyone in project management knows that, even if you’re more RUP than XP, changing priorities is the most strategic and creative part of your work. Yes, IMHO, those PM products just don’t let you do your work correctly…

So, for what we know, wiki’s don’t have the core project-management features… but project management programs neither!

So, we now use a web portal where we aggregate editable datasources stored in Google Apps. Of course, prioritization, reporting and billing must be done ‘by hand’ but the result is : nobody need a technical training and everyone contributes easily at the right place, in an exportable, reusable format.

This being said, we’ve been wandering a lot, and I am conscious we still could have it all wrong. So please tell us more in case you still think we should use a wiki or a good project mpanagement package.

I think Michael took it all wrong. I have not gone to any BarCamps, and do not represent any. I just noticed that they are big users of PBWiki, and there was discussion here regarding “who needs a wiki”. I don’t spam people, don’t know why you thought my comment was spam. And I doubt most BarCampers would be the type of people that spam others.

I am currently supporting a few very successful wikis for higher ed, in MediaWiki, but PBWiki would be our first choice for a hosted solution.

The crew over at PBWiki has also been very sensitive to the educational community by providing ad free wiki’s to educational entities. I did a School 2.0 presentation today with Stanford Student Teachers and will do another tomorrow with Graduate students in Educational Technology at NDNU, PBWiki is a central part of the conversation because of their educational commitment. When I finished my presentation and cruised the room to assist students, I found that three students had already created PBWiki’s and had already began to include content to their sites.

We use this for our internal company wiki. The company wiki has information that is related to all of our business operations, for example - phone & fax numbers, addresses, FAQ’s, software info, etc. We set this up as all of our information was spread around from person to person & when changes were made some people were not informed. Now with the wiki, all the information everybody had is online & can be updated in real time.

http://www.shinyliving.com/?p=17

anyone know the revenue split of the two partnering co.s?

I just wanted to let people who are looking at wiki’s for task managenment and notes there are better solutions.

http://barcamp.org/

Policies and other notes and documentation as well.

You do need to do some good wiki gardening, but that applies to any wiki, not just a PBWiki.

-david

I installed DokuWiki on my own server though.
Feels more secure.

We’re also actively looking for partners to bring great tools to our users, so if your company has something interesting like 30 Boxes, please get in touch (ramit@pbwiki.com).

Velioncho(#1): Check out some ideas/examples of wiki uses here:
http://yummy.pbwiki.com/Ideas-for-using-PBwiki

Probably my favorite use of PBWiki though was working with the Spirit of America foundation to put up guides on blogging anonymously in 5 languages, for bloggers living under repressive governments. That’s at http://blogsafer.org Someone else compiled and translated the guides then we put it up in a wiki so that as government tactics changed, people could change the guides accordingly. There are about 40 people subscribed to the recent changes RSS feed for that wiki to make sure the site doesn’t get vandalized. PBWiki was great for putting up text in other languages, including ones read right-to-left.

I’ve used other wikis and would again, but I do like PBWiki for its ease of use and power features.

There is market potential for “Collaborate” concept, but nobody really solved the problem. There are wikis, there are these “collaborate” office tools - doc, spreadsheet,project management. But none of these really work in real time. Users are abandoning these after using it for couple of projects.We are stuck at the same level - wikipedia was successful, so everything has to follow same pattern.

Wake up and think outside the box.

Anybody here really use it other than just for sake of “trying new thing”.