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FacebookSingle Sourcing Wiki Tools for the Enterprise — Traction TeamPage5?
March 29th, 2007 | Posted in Wikis 7 Comments »
A member on the Online SIG asked the following question. With his permission, I posted it here as well:
My company is looking to single source the documentation my team creates for our products. We need a solution that will be a repository for authoritative versions of documents that many people from several different departments can use to get the documents they need. The solution should also be able to export documents in HTML, XML, Word, PDF, and RTF.
The killer part of this issue is that we would also like to introduce a wiki for our Website support/help pages. So I have been trying to find a single source solution where we can export documents to the above formats, but also import data that is submitted into the wiki back into the “repository” in somewhat of an automated fashion.
I have discovered several single source methods that can produce content in many different formats, but am having a harder time finding a solution that will interface seamlessly with a customer-facing wiki.
Anyone out there had any experience with a single source solution that has a wiki component?
A Possible Solution
A while ago my friend Clyde posted a link to an excellent review of enterprise-level wikis. The article reviews several and then recommends Traction TeamPage as the best. Traction TeamPage was voted best enterprise wiki of 2007 by InfoWorld, and it does allow you to export the wiki content to Microsoft Word or as a PDF.
Although the most robust versions are costly, Traction recently released a free version that might serve many people’s needs. Traction TeamPage5, which anyone can download and use either commercially or non-commercially, is described as follows:
Traction® TeamPage5 is a free version of Traction Software’s award winning TeamPage Server product. TeamPage5 supports up to 5 projects (blog / wiki spaces) and 5 named user accounts with individually defined permissions and identities. Projects can also be opened to Visitors (e.g. you can open any space so that anyone on your intranet can read, edit, comment or post). Registration for TeamPage5 provides a personal account on our support server to download software updates, read customer and product FAQ’s, and participate in Traction’s customer Forum.
Traction® TeamPage5 is simple to download, install and manage. TeamPage software can be deployed on your intranet, corporate DMZ or on the public internet using a computer that supports Java server software, see TeamPage System Requirements. TeamPage5 provides a free way to create a collaborative communication hub which can scale to meet your future needs. You can easily upgrade to TeamPage15 or TeamPage at any time.
I haven’t used Traction TeamPage5 myself, but it looks like a robust, extensible, scalable wiki that would work well in the enterprise. 
If you have another product you think would work well to meet the requirements the reader is looking for, please share it in the comments below.
Another Tool Question: Open Source Webex?
While we’re on the topic of tools, does anyone know of an open source version of Webex or LiveMeeting? I was looking at www.vyew.com
today and I think it might work. I want to start doing virtual software saturdays, where an expert would give a 2 hr tutorial on a tool that anyone could join in to watch. I’ve never used Vyew. If anyone has any feedback on it or a similar tool, please share it with me.
Hi Tom,
regarding your first question: Mindquarry (http://www.mindquarry.com) is an Open Source Enterprise Wiki for Collaboration that was designed from ground up to be extensible and multi-format. Everything in Mindquarry is stored as XML document and these documents are available via an REST interface (so it is very easy to write custom applications that retrieve data from the wiki or publish data to the wiki)
Additionally every Wiki page can be represented in three formats: XML, HTML (the default) and PDF. Our development framework makes it possible to support additional formats like Word or RTF as well.
Disclaimer: I am founder and COO of Mindquarry and we offer enterprise support and customization for Mindquarry, so I might be biased.
Regarding your second question: Did you take a look at Dimdim (http://www.dimdim.com/) it positions itself as an Open Source Alternative to WebEx, so it might be what you are looking for. (I am not affiliated with Dimdim)
Thanks for your reply, Lars. I remember reading a few things about Mindquarry on your site, but I didn’t know much about it. I’ll have to try it out sometime.
Also, thanks for the dimdim.com site. That does look to be exactly what I’m searching for. Their site says they aren’t ready to launch the product, but I signed up to be notified when that happens.
Keep up your great blog.
[...] been interested in this tool and once mentioned it in a post , but I’ve never explored it. Please let me know how it works. I did try dimdim.com, but [...]
Hi there,
I’m involved in the deployment of a documentation solution for our company. We have two visions right now. The one I’m pushing a single-source based solution because we have defined many audiences and we want to be able to reuse content.
Another vision is to use a wiki that would document every small component and them link them together.
If I could find a single-source based wiki, I’d be very happy. It seems Traction® TeamPage5 is not a single-source type system and I’m afraid that if we use such a system we’ll be doing some cut’n'paste for nothing…
Any other solution would be appreciated!
Anne Gentle just wrote about wiki slicing on her blog. It might be a way to aggregate a lot of different pages on a specific topic.
Re single sourcing and wiki use, did you listen to my latest podcast on this topic? Anne talks about the possibility of outputting to wiki.
My personal advice echoes Anne’s: use the wiki as a supplement to your documentation rather than the core of it. Your users may not contribute as much as you think (unless your entire project team is writing the documentation). Remember that you have a job as a technical author and others may just dump all documentation tasks on you, rather than writing them on the wiki. Others usually do not like to do documentation for fun. So even if you started up a wiki, you might be making 99 percent of the contributions. Use a single sourcing tool — Flare, RoboHelp, ePublisher, or some DITA tool — to create your content. Flare even allows users to make comments beneath each topic now. Then have your wiki as a supplement to the online help.
Sorry, but that’s the best solution I can think of right now. If you find a way to single source your wiki into a PDF output that is coherent and useful, let me know.
Thx for the answer Tom,
I did start listening to the podcast at home, then read the whole interview on justwriteclick.com instead because I can’t connect to the podcast from work… (yeah I know…)
I further analyzed our needs and I think that for our norms and process documentation, we don’t need to use single-sourcing because we won’t reuse content that much, if at all.
For user guides, however, it’s the best solution IMHO because we will reuse content. Plus, if we want to publish (in whatever format) a whole guide containing the User and Developer parts, we can; with a wiki, we’ll have to maintain two sources, and that can become a nightmare.
I did talk to Anne through e-mail and she told me about her wiki slicing article, going to read it now!
Thx for the advice, I’ll keep you posted! Your sites (Anne’s and yours) are my discoveries of the week
And I’ll check out Flare. I did do lots of work as a technical author with XML + DocBook, managing and publishing multilingual manuals using single sourcing, but I haven’t used more commercial tools like Frame and RoboHelp for that purpose.
Do you have a blog feed I can save? I looked around but couldn’t find it, thanks in advance.