Using social networking tools to produce an external web site Sam J Watkins, BSc, MBCS

Introduction Benefits of using social networking tools to form a collaboratively produced corporate web site I’ll do this by… Context Overview of how R&V works Managing a corporate web site How it all needs to work – process management Traditional approach and why not! How the TWiki works How the TWiki works – process management What the TWiki delivered

Context

Overview of effective Research and Venturing Broadband Research Networks Pervasive ICT ICT Futures Security Futures 324 people! Lots of information for many audiences Different audiences, site attraction, hooking into existing processes, different contributors Clear, accessible information BT brand is worth…? Our contributors… One voice in many forms New information, search results, ease of use, relates to your audience

Managing a corporate web site Simplicity of information handling Tracking: who did what, when Large community contributing Export functionality Process defining what happened where Ease of use for all concerned!

How it all needs to work – process management Page written Reviewed Released Rework required

Traditionally go to So why not! Heavy duty, purpose built Content Management System… Dreamweaver, LiveLink, Cold Fusion. All have their plus points and their disadvantages! So why not! No-one has any compunction to contribute No dedicated team to manage the CMS Many different teams all operating well in different environments Assigning different people different roles meant disjointed work flow Need to retain information for a long time and reasonably static page addresses We used Twiki, but also: OddMuse pimki PodWiki SnipSnap TikiWiki TWiki – a structured wiki, typically used to support knowledge bases. Think an eclipse of wiki’s. Wiclear XWiki

Social networking tools – why wikis Each centre owns a web, responsible person owns the look and feel.

What is TWiki? Twiki is a Wiki-wiki-web clone a flexible, powerful, and easy to use Enterprise Collaboration Platform http://www.twiki.org/ Description Targets the corporate intranet world TWiki fosters information flow within an organization lets distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively eliminates the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content Each centre owns a web, responsible person owns the look and feel.

How TWiki works Pervasive ICT Networks ICT Futures Broadband Research Security Futures Each centre owns a web, responsible person owns the look and feel.

How the TWiki works – process management Author writes page on the TWiki Released on to review platform Tested in a “real environment” Reviewed Page may be edited while it is being reviewed

TWiki delivered 1400 pages in three months with 1/3 of R&V directly contributing. All of this content was cleared within five days of submission. 800 pages were re-branded in 2 days Pages are easily shared, allowing easy maintenance Top quality documents produced for a wide audience quickly and easily. Version control Little security maintenance Content managed separately to html markup Automatic semantic markup No requirement on the user to manage anything High quality output

Summary Using the social networking tool allowed web site content to be gathered really quickly All interested parties could use the tool We could handle all types of media in the TWiki easily ….. We had to write our own tools for exporting the content