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

2. 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

3. Context

4. 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

5. 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!

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

7. 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

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

9. What is TWiki? Twiki is a Wiki-wiki-web clone
a flexible, powerful, and easy to use Enterprise Collaboration Platform
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eliminates the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content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.

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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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