Cornelia's Weblog

I am currently working in a cross industry group and we have elected to use a Wiki for collaboration. Now, I’ll admit right off that coming originally from the eRoom side of EMC (I currently work in the Content Management Software Group) I have been spoiled and I measure all collaborative experiences against that of eRoom, and frankly none has measured up. To be fair, though, wiki’s aren’t intended to solve the same collaboration problem that eRoom does. A wiki is a great way to do collaborative web content management, no doubt about that. In fact, I’ve even heard it said that wiki’s are the new WCM platform. In this collaborative scenario, work items are the web pages themselves and the wiki wraps collaboration around those work items with discussion pages, histories, etc. all associated associated with a web page. But at the point where the work items are not web pages, rather they are documents (Word or Open Document Format, PDF, etc.), issues, tasks or other items, then the collaboration support offered by the wiki is ill suited.The short of it is that the object model of wikis fundamentally contains a web page. That of collaboration tools such as eRoom contain many other things such as folders, documents, structured information (on which items, change orders, etc can all be modelled), tasks, links, etc., and the collaboration capabilities are wrapped around those.In the future I won’t be so quick to agreeing to use a wiki for collaboration that is not fundamentally around the creation of web pages.