Well, we are talking about Perspective, not ScrewTurn (although I like its
approach) and we are talking about small to medium-size companies that want
Wikis for projects, document management, occasional "blogging" via personal
pages, a place to store policy and procedure manuals, but mostly about
projects. Not fancy WikiTalk or web page design - nobody really cares about
that, except techies.
And we are talking about ordinary people, not programmers, not IT people,
not developers, but sales guys, front reception folks, the CEO and VPs, the
HR department. IOW, real people with real needs - needs that are simple,
looking for a simple solution, easy to use - and therein lies the issue.
FlexWiki doesn't come close to meeting those needs. Sorry... but that's a
fact. It has very little end-user simplicity. It's not intuitive - and
trying to even bold a sentence is cryptic and foreboding to users.
A wiki is a forum for business that should enable both private and public
input (but within the company itself). The private part through projects,
public through the availability of manuals and documents, a bit of blogging,
but that's about it. Otherwise, I don't want my people futzing around with
wiki web pages. I want them to go to a well-indexed set of pages, do their
lookups, read the manuals, offer suggestions, then get the hell back to
work.
I want our sales guys to have private areas where they can set up projects
and store documents, and get at them easily and quickly. I don't want them
wasting time searching through pages - just go to an index, select the
project and open it up and contribute: status updates, current client
contacts and so on.
I want my lease manager to be able to set up various private leases and
attach documents to them, and let me see them when I want, from wherever I
want. I want to be able to simply add others to those projects, under my
authority, without having to go through all kinds of silly adminstrative
panels and crap. And don't expect me to remember everyone's handles - I
haven't time for that. I need a pop up to pick from.
"1000 pages"! Who would want or need 1000 pages and who would even care
about searching, except under rare circumstances? Indexing is the key to
lookup, not google-type searching. I don't want my people spending their
valuable time doing a bunch of random searches. If they have a purpose, go
to the index, grab the topic, look it up and get on with it.
99% of small businesses (under 100 employees with the sweet spot at 25-30)
aren't using wikis, but they should be. They don't use them because there's
little there to offer them.
It's always the same problem when programmers are turned loose without a
concept, guidance or vision. They program the damn solutions to death, to
the point where nobody wants them because they don't solve any problems.
Regards,
_____
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Astralis
Lux
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2007 5:01 PM
To: flexwiki-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Flexwiki-users] ScrewTurn Wiki
Jim said: >> ScrewTurn Wiki and Perspective are both great wikis. We've
moved away from FlexWiki and are in correspondence with one of those two and
find them very cooperative. They have a business attitude towards their
products rather than a programmer's attitude. IOW, they are designing for
the users, not for the cleverness of programming.
Jim, I understand what you're saying. And I think the major developers here
understand it too. But behind the shiny css, ScrewTurn nor Perspective are
not superior (not particularly worse, either). ScrewTurn is currently going
through an upgrade which will happen when 2.1 is released and that is an
effort to bring it up to speed with almost all of the features that FlexWiki
has.
Some definiciencies I see with ScrewTurn is that it lacks the ability to
have tags and organize content around keywords. It also lacks namespaces
and templates and a "recently changed" system. Without this you have a very
static site and people are already complaining about major performance
issues with only 1,000 pages. And the search isn't so hot. Also, if you
want to do any sort of customizing that is currently being asked on ST you
must know C#. With FlexWiki you only need to know WikiTalk and can do the
customizing immediately (and there is probably already sample WikiTalk code
on FlexWiki.com that you can grab). Anyone who can spend an hour learning
WikiTalk (with a little programming experience, granted) will easily do all
the customizing that ScrewTurn can do only when writing and compiling code.
You can take the positives and negatives out of that at will.
FlexWiki is also working on a new version (2.0). I believe that if FlexWiki
looked more user-friendly then you would be saying that ScrewTurn doesn't
have everything that FlexWiki has. But I think this is something that can
easily be remedied with the following focus on users:
1. FW CSS redesign (to be able to design the pages using CSS through div ids
-- they're working on that for 2.0.)
2. Redesign the default FlexWiki and therefore FlexWiki.com to appear more
modern and show off what FW can do (although it doesn't do everything that
ST does, it does do a lot that ST cannot do).
[The following points will not be effective without the implementation of #1
and #2]
3. Flush the current pages on FlexWiki.com and only keep those that help
people to:
a. install FlexWiki
b. configure FlexWiki
c. fomat FlexWiki pages
4. Segregate the discussions about WikiTalk on FlexWiki.com that may impede
people from installing FlexWiki in an advanced section.
5. Show off the base wiki without WikiTalk. Then show the pages that do
have WikiTalk in an advanced and/or customize section. I think the idea
that FlexWiki is WikiTalk is confusing people, especially for the beginners.
They cannot get passed the basics because they believe they have to know
WikiTalk. In reality, the simple basics are all there and and almost do
everything that ST can do. Then show them what it can do in addition to ST
by including WikiTalk for advanced users. Maybe consider WikiTalk as the
ability to create customizations beyond the powerful base wiki.
6. Allow minor edits with section headers and add a table of contents based
on these headers. (e.g. Wikimedia, ST)
7. Create a discussion page per topic (e.g., Wikimedia, ST).
8. Incorporate a support message-board. This is for people who want access
to easy questions and answers and to know that if they have problems that
there are people there who care about usability and want to help.
9. Incorporate a developer blog focused on users instead of code.
I think a lot of the deficiencies of FW are simply perceptions based on the
current discussions and the poor physical design of FlexWiki.com (straight
from 1994). If you take a deeper look at FW you will see that it is
extremely flexible and powerful. Unfortunately, perceptions do matter.
10. Simplied admin system where many of the controls can be accessed via
admin (page locking, security, member management, cache management,
configuration, etc...)
11. Develop a membership system.
12. WYSIWYG editor. Perspective is the only one that has a WYSIWYG editor
that and it's not so great when you look at it. ST uses what Wikimedia
uses. It's a tool bar that throws out wiki code when you click a button.
Experienced users will probably not even use it but beginners will
definitely use it.
13. Like ST, use Wikimedia as the main model. It has a massive userbase and
they have encountered almost all the issues that wiki users face.
I think that #10 and #11, while nice, are not absolutely needed because of
how you can limit people But I can see how it impedes people from choosing
FW.
Regards,
Astralis
_____
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