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By Scott Brown

August and September of 2008 are two months of intense wiki training for me. To be clear, I'm giving the training, not receiving it.

I currently provide two training sessions via WebEx for Sun Microsystems employees: ‘Getting Started with Wikis', a basic primer on simply creating and editing wiki pages; and ‘Doing More with Wikis', a slightly more advanced session that's essentially about the beauty of copying someone else's code that you like and modifying it for your own purposes.

This recent demand for wiki training has made me reflect upon how wikis have undergone an evolution within Sun over the past few years.

Wiki as project management tool

Sun Microsystems is a leading high-technology organisation that competes with companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, as well as many other smaller technology firms. As such, it's also a company full of people who like to play with and adopt new technologies. It's common to see mention of new ‘bleeding edge' tools in email threads. The Digital Libraries & Research (DL&R) team at Sun, of which I'm a part, works closely with the Sun engineering population and tracks these kinds of tools as well, especially those that may have potential for information applications.

Sun has been using tools such as wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and other social networking tools for several years, to various degrees. With regards to wikis, we had at least four different wiki platforms that various groups were using in the company by July 2007.

In Autumn 2006, our DL&R team moved under the Learning Technology (LT) group within Sun Learning Services (SLS). (Can you tell we like acronyms too?) The LT group is a dominant driver of 2.0 technologies for learning in Sun. One of the first tools they introduced was a Confluence wiki platform open to all SLS as a way to conduct project management and connect SLS as a group.

SLS quickly put the wiki to use. Many teams put together wiki pages for their groups. They also fully embraced the ‘many contributers' model of wikis by using it to keep track of meeting notes, post documents for group input, and even to hold contests (people could use the wiki, for example, to suggest names for the wiki itself).

Towards mid-2007, more interest began to build around wikis enterprise-wide. People were asking, ‘What can we use? What's available?' And the answer, at that point, was, ‘Well, there are at least four wiki instances in use across Sun; go ask one of the wiki admins to give you a space. Good luck.' (Not that the wiki admins were not nice and accommodating people. However, I'm sure they were getting requests from every part of the company for wiki access.)

Wiki as community builder

Sun is a somewhat unique company in that, for the past several years, its workforce has become highly distributed. A growing percentage of Sun employees are ‘home-assigned'; in other words, they work most, if not all, of their time from a home office. With so many employees in literally thousands of locations, the ability for employees to connect with each other and to share information effectively become paramount. Social networking tools provide another layer of connectivity and the ability to share information.

Wikis.sun.com was launched in Autumn 2007, with a philosophical base similar to blogs.sun.com. The idea behind both is to have Sun employees drive a community of knowledge, whether from the perspective of an individual's expertise in a particular technology, or a Sun group participating in a topic. But here's the thing: the idea for both of these was not just to have Sun talking to itself, so to speak. The idea was to have Sun driving a community that not only included other Sun employees, but also Sun partners, customers, developers, and anyone else who wanted to participate.

The great thing about the launch of wikis.sun.com was that it provided an enterprise-wide wiki platform; there wasn't the need to try to convince a wiki admin to give you a space. The downside was, at least at the time of launch, there wasn't the ability to have a wiki just for employee use. The wiki had to be external-facing.

This changed relatively quickly because there was such a huge demand for using wikis as a way to collaborate among employee groups at Sun. Employees quickly realised that an enterprise-wide wiki platform could provide another tool in our growing set of collaboration tools. While wikis.sun.com is still used for community building outside of Sun employees, there is also a large base of Sun teams using it for their own internal collaboration.

Wiki as a step to the 2.0 enterprise

This is the main reason I'm doing so much training lately. Now that we have a cross-enterprise wiki platform through wikis.sun.com, many groups are looking at wikis as a way to move away from a ‘static' web - a world of intranets that are tightly controlled, or only able to be updated by a webmaster or someone with access to the content management system - to a world where information can be updated much more quickly and be actively maintained by the group. As a result, many teams are coming to DL&R for training on how to use wikis and are in the process of migrating their information to the wiki platform. Over the next nine months, we, too, will be migrating our content.

Wiki ‘mashup'

It's fascinating to look back and see this evolution of wiki usage within the company. What's more interesting is to think about what the next couple of years look like for wikis and other 2.0 tools in the enterprise.

I've worked with teams who are customising the way they provide access to their information by combining their wiki with other tools. For example, one team is using a collaboration site (similar to LiveLink) to manage their documents, but pointing to those documents and folders from their wiki site. This provides a way for them to more tightly control the documents themselves to maintain authority, while still leveraging the flexibility and community of the wiki.

What's the next stage of wiki usage within Sun? The recently-launched SunSpace, based on an instance of the Confluence wiki platform, might point the way. SunSpace is, at its core, a wiki community, but integrates functionality from many different social networking tools to create a more complex and nuanced community. People and experts can connect and share information, and users build ‘social equity' based upon their contribution to and participation in the community.

As Sun continues to experiment with and integrate 2.0 technologies, I expect wikis will look very different this time next year. Watch for more developments on our Digital Libraries & Research blog.

Scott Brown is a Senior Information Specialist with Digital Libraries & Research, Sun Microsystems' global corporate library. He joined Sun in January 2000. Scott is currently Chair of the Competitive Intelligence Division within SLA. He received his MLIS from San Jose State University and his bachelors' degree from University of California at Santa Cruz.

He is pursuing a Licensed Professional Counselor licensure for Colorado. He likes to blog (when he finds the time) about corporate life, music, and whatever else seems to come up. He currently resides in Longmont, Colorado with his wife and daughter.

Other related FUMSI stories: 

Widgets for Content Distribution: A Shift in the Internet: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/2637

Intranet 2.0: Ten Not-So-Easy Steps: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/3091

Corporate Blogging: How To Be Open: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/3199

Secret Leeds: Share Your Secrets, Share Your City: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/3127

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