SharePoint use is picking up!
The past few weeks have shown a steady growth in usage of my team’s collaboration tools here at the office. We’ve got a growing body of work on our SharePoint-driven wikis and forums. Links to these repositories are going out more and more often via emails to teammates who haven’t yet contributed new pages.
There are several obvious fits for wikis in team collaboration, expertly outlined by wiki evangelist Stewart Mader in 5 Effective Wiki Uses, a post I like so much that I keep it up on my cubicle wall. The most popular use around here has been fortechnical documentation. We’ve got plenty ofHOWTO pages springing up, repositories for commonly used commands, and some helpful tips and tricks. I also try to keep the Project Management and Customer Collaboration angles going by pushing my workflow through a wiki page or a forum if at all possible. If someone sends me a technical question, I’ll try to write it up and email them a link back as well as a standard solicitation for comments and updates.
A recent group project has accelerated my use of SharePoint for software development work. The wiki page for a persistent technical issue grew over the course of a week to have 70+ edits in the version history, a running log of daily status updates and comments, functional requirements from affiliated analysts, screenshots of working prototypes, and links to offsite references like vendor help docs and an amazon page for an SAP Press book on Integrated Planning.
Rapidly fleshing out this page and sharing links back and forth during team work sessions proved to be entertaining and quite useful. I’ve noticed that debugging software can be a very frustrating process for me when I can’t find sufficient resources – I’ll try to brute force my way through the problem but I’ll eventually slow down and begin repeating myself. By trying to discipline myself enough to log every test into a wiki page I have much more to show for my time and can be assured I’m doing a lot less rework.
Does your team collaborate with web tools such as SharePoint?
Maybe you’re using Confluence or SharePoint or PBWiki or Yammer. We’re learning a lot about the flexibility of the wiki format: The lack of structure allows users to impose their own conventions on the system in many useful ways. John Tropea’s “comment below this line” convention has been working well. A teammate suggested that the comments lists would be more useful if the newest posts were at the top of the list; that’s helped a good bit already.
Soon I’ll need to play the role of wiki gnome and clean up some of the great content that’s been banged out in realtime during productive work sessions. What sort of collaboration success practices has your team adopted? Are you seeing multiple styles of participation coexisting peacefully? Do you have dueling schools of thought like Wikipedia’s inclusionist vs. deletionist debate? Let me know in the comments below, I’d love to learn from you.
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