Well, John Udell named 2004 "Year of the Enterprise Wiki", but I'd say it's going to be 2005. Wikizen is my little corner of the world to tell you why I think that.
So who the hell am I?
... and why should you listen to me? That's a damn good question and probably a very appropriate place for a blog to start.
My name is Mike Cannon-Brookes and I'm a founder of Atlassian - an innovative Australian enterprise software company that helps dynamic teams within large organisations work better together on knowledge projects. A mouthful? In a nutshell, we help people do their "knowledge work".
We have two products aimed at the two different sides of a knowledge project - tasks and text:
- JIRA - our revolutionary project management tool tracks the project's tasks (issues, improvements, problems, things-to-do), and
- Confluence - our professional wiki manages the team's text (documents, notes, thoughts, ideas).
You may not have heard of us - but I'll bet you a pineapple you've heard of a few of our customers. From tech giants like Oracle, HP and Cisco to the planet's biggest banks, from manufacturing powerhouses like GE and 3M to world leading research organisations like NASA and CERN - we have over 2000 customers in 35+ countries across the globe. Helping teams talk is our business and I think we're pretty damn good at it :)
I'm guessing if you're here - you're probably more interested in wikis than project management esoterica, but they actually work very well in combination - I'll tell you why in the future.
Confluence
Confluence is our enterprise wiki - and it appeared in 2004, so perhaps Jon was right in one way. Like any wiki it allows you to share information by editing pages, browsing links and all the features wiki users are accustomed to.
It does a hell of a lot more than that though - with enterprise permissioning, full text searching, integrated blogs, hierarchical page structures, page refactorings, group email archiving, PDF exports and a whole lot more.
Anyway, I'm here to talk about wikis not sell them - so if you're interested, you can learn more or just try it.
Wikizen
All the English sticklers in the world (Hi mum!) are probably groaning, but a wikizen is more of a concept than a word.
Originally just meant to be a contraction of wiki and zen - hence enlightenment about wikis, it has also been pointed out to me that it's a contraction of wiki and citizen - hence people who use wikis in their work, citizens of the wiki world.
Anyway, its a neat word, a catchy blog title and I like it :)
My goals for this blog are to talk about wikis and how they fit into broader categories like social software (is anyone else sick of that term already?), groupware (viva the early 90s!) and the world of knowledge work. I spend a lot of my time travelling the world talking to customers about how and why they use our wiki in their daily operations, and I hope to impart some of that knowledge to you - the fine reader - here! We'll see how it goes...
Well first posts are always hard but the good thing is you only have to do them once.
If you're still reading - let me bid you welcome, thanks for reading and "watch this space"!
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