Because of the inherent simplicity of the technology, wiki projects are less likely to fail in implementation than WCM or ECM projects. However, many companies still struggle to get the desired value out of their wiki initiatives. Purely managed and abandoned wikis have become yet another set of silos for information to hide in.
Janus Boye and Dorthe Jespersen's new report Wiki in the Enterprise contains a very well conceived and written analysis of what it takes to successfully implement a corporate wikis. Their research is based on interviews with enterprise wiki adopters and personal experience. It covers:
the positioning of wiki's in the content technology marketplace and the benefits that they promise
real world experience the impact and challenges of adopting wikis
recommendations for executing a wiki initiative
Their advice covers the cultural and organizational aspects of information management that are so often overlooked in technology-oriented projects. If you are considering using a wiki to support collaboration or information management in your company, and rightly understand that success is not a matter of technology, you should definitely read this report.
Dries reports on a 2 day sprint in Paris where they added a test framework into the Drupal 7 core. Drupal leadership is stressing automated testing for two main reasons: automated testing will allow the developer community to efficiently scale and will allow more development to occur in a release cycle. The idea behind the former, is that automated testing can remove the some of the manual overhead from the committer and help maintain quality as more contributors submit code.
As for the latter, today code freeze happens less than half way through the release cycle. Drupal 6 was developed for 5 months and was in code freeze to fix bugs for 7. By shortening the code freeze period, Drupal can either release more often or get more functionality into each release.
It remains to be seen how actively the rank and file Drupal development community (especially the module developers) will embrace the test framework. Historically, Drupal has had a fast and loose development style that has been both productive and chaotic. Dries' passion around the subject and the presence of Acquia will certainly help but only time will tell.
My report "Open Source Web Content Management in Java" is receiving enthusiastic praise. Thanks Sandro Groganz, Steven Noels, and James Robertson for the kind words. I have posted some quotes here. But don't just take their word for it. Read it for yourself!
As one would expect on TSS, the audience is definitely biased toward Java and there is a fair share of "PHP programmers can't code." However, there are also plenty of well supported arguments in the comments too - even a little bit of introspection. No Springer-esque chair throwing but definitely worth a scan.
Michael Sampson has been running a series of practical tips for virtual teams: A-Z of Virtual Teams. While Northampton, Massachusetts is not as remote to my client base as New Zealand, none of my clients are local so these tips are certainly useful to me. Many of the tips are common sense but what makes them really worth reading is that at the end of each one there is a section called "What do I need to do?" This is where Michael spells out actionable strategies for applying the principle.
Contrary to what you would expect from me, I actually think this is a good thing. Microsoft Office is the de facto standard. Being a de jure, official standard doesn't help OpenDocument if when you send an open document file to anyone they say that they can't open it. Ideally, Microsoft would have adopted OpenDocument but that wasn't to happen. The next best thing is for MS to adhere to their OOXML standard and alternative office suites support it. That Microsoft originated the standard doesn't mean that they will be the only one to benefit from it going forward. Just look at Sun and Java.
While I don't think the world loses with this move, OpenOffice (Sun in particular) and OASIS certainly took blows. OpenOffice can quickly recover by building in support for OOXML. The format should be easier to support than having to reverse engineer prior Microsoft formats. OASIS gets injured because it shows the limitation of de jure standard against a de facto standard.
Dries Buytaert has an announcement on his blog for another startup that he is working on called Mollom. Mollom is a content monitoring service that is optimized for user generated content. Beyond tracking and blocking comment spam, Mollom's goal is to rate the quality of content. Mollom is now in public beta and free (as in beer). Once out of beta, there will be a free simple version and a for-pay premium version.
The technology works as a web service (details here). When a comment or user generated post is submitted, your website sends it to Mollom. Mollum will assess if it is likely to be spam. If it is, Mollum sends back a CAPTCHA for the submitter to fill out.
The service requires you to install a plugin into your CMS. Drupal users can take advantage of a pre-built module. There is also a Java library that can be integrated into Java CMS. Everyone else must build their own plugin on top of the Mollom Open API. Hopefully, other CMS vendors and users of their platforms will build plugins and submit them to Mollom for distribution. If Mollom takes off, a WordPress plugin can't be too far away.
I will not try to dig too much into the dynamics between Mollom and Acquia. Dries explains that Acquia is his day job while Mollom is his spare-time, unfunded startup. In his blog post, Dries mentions that Acquia will offer Mollom as part of their Caliper project. I wouldn't say that Dries is doing this because he is bored. He started the initiative with fellow student Benjamin Schrauwen before the Acquia opportunity came along. When he negotiated the Acquia job, he probably got permission to work on this. As an Acquia investor, I would be a little concerned about Dries' commitment to their start-up. But, given Dries' value to any Drupal-based business, I am sure that the VC's are willing to give him wide latitude.