For those of you who did not attend MSBC today, or for those of you who did and would like a record of my presentation, these are the salient points from my ten-minute presentation to the MSBC (Moray Small Business Club). I gave this presentation to share an idea as small business owner to small business owner.

Background

I decided to give this talk soon after Malcolm Aldridge, our organiser, announced a spotlight session for the MSBC January meet.

At that time, the end of November 2008, my systems administrator at Red Isle, with whom I share an office, installed the MediaWiki software. Lo and behold, we were up and running with a long-sought solution to creating a complete documentation resource for our office, intended to be useful for when office administration is passed on to someone else, an employee say, or because one of us has met with a bus ...

My presentation material was a page from my wiki, written specifically for the presentation and using a connection to the office's VPN (virtual private network). Therefore the material is not publicly available and the following account represents what I presented to view.

What is a wiki?

Hawaiian for "fast"

Collaborative writing tool, e.g. Wikipedia

"By 2009, at least 50 percent of organizations will use wikis as important work collaboration tools"

Reedmace/Red Isle's original concept

Information for system administrators: without paper, easily changeable

List of things to do: no whiteboard or rewriting

From start-up to now

Installed end of November 2008.

Bingo! Very useful! The original concept of the wiki was fulfilled, and I soon found other uses.

Then I quickly gave a quick tour of the main page and navigated back to my presentation page:

Main_page: the table of contents is automatically generated once four main headings have been written into a wiki page;

Katharine's stuff (my main page): because I had logged onto the office's VPN and opened my wiki for this presentation. The page's table of contents was used to navigate to the section for MSBC, where there was an internal link to the presentation page.

Uses for small businesses

Office procedures: e.g. our office wiki

Team working/project management: e.g. for a particular project involving many teams, as a resource for new employees

Information sharing: e.g. Society for Editors and Proofreaders wiki, a members' wiki with the main page visible to the public but further access requires a log in. The wiki is for SfEP members who wish to contribute or simply use the resource; a social networking site,$ Geohashing.

Other uses of a wiki from the floor (to be written in a table)

This part of the presentation was not given. Time did not allow us to concentrating on the specifics of writing in a wiki or entering other uses of a wiki from the floor.

What next?

Technology

MediaWiki software is free.

For a small business with a single office, consider a dedicated separate server (and also gives capability for other web-based applications). The advantages over using a hosting provider is increased speed of page calls to the browser. The advantages over installing and writing to an individual desk computer is that the wiki is shareable.

The most recent server that the office uses (actually an external web and mail server) cost £200 (pictured on the right here, underneath the two blue routers). This is as fast as the internal server that serves the VPN (on the left) bought in April 2008. So an internal network solution does not call for much space or cost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSBC attendees were directed to Damian Connell of Red Isle to find out more.

* Writing

View source on simple wiki page (not Wikipedia's main page!)

See the office's view blog post on this website about writing in this wiki.

See this blog post about this presentation.

Or ask me anytime.

Questions

What is the difference between giving information in a wiki and doing the same in a Word document stored on a shared file system?
Answer: The wiki can provide information on the file system without having to navigate through the directories: the browser search facility supplements any initial instructions more efficiently than a directory search. This information can be added to quickly, hence the name "wiki", and because a wiki is recognised to be used for collaborations by definition, adding/clarifying information is better encouraged. Important files can be uploaded to the wiki from the file system (though beware of different versions of duplicate files).

Should a wiki be served with a hosting package or on an intranet?
Answer: The choice depends on requirements.

Can some users have the ability to write and others only to read?
Answer: Yes. Also, if someone gets it wrong, you can roll back to a previous version of a page.

A final comment

Keeping bearing in mind the use of a wiki for your business. Whether you can think of a need now or whether you only need time for imagination, a wiki is very easy and very effective.