Hi AnnOnn, and welcome to The Cove!
My company is currently looking at using confluence which looks similar to Wiki - I have a problem though, how to you ensure document control? I like the idea that latest amendments to documents are visible and all obsolete documents archived, BUT how do you ensure that:
- only 'approved' persons amend documents
- only final 'approved' documents are visible to the masses
Confluence is a great wiki. As with most wikis, you can indeed control who can edit and view pages or groups of pages. With the Comalatech addon that Jhinckley mentions, you can even manage "workflows", to ensure a specific sequence of steps (like edit-review-approvals) take place before a wiki page is released.
Still, I'd advise to grant more privileges to all your team members than you may be comfortable with. Your process participants are a most knowledgeable source of improvements in processes and their documentation. Trust them. Allowing them editing capabilities captures their tacit knowledge, turning it into explicit knowledge, and this happens amazingly quickly.
Two subtle features of the wiki ensure that the vast majority of edits are beneficial. (1) all changes are recorded, timestamped and bylined. (2) Process owners (and other participants) can be notified of changes to their docs automatically by RSS or email. The first feature discourages malicious or incompetent edits. The second insures that in the rare cases those do occur, they are quickly corrected. Revertion of edits takes two clicks.
Much more common than reversions are lots of minor edits. Say an operator spotted a weakness in the process or document, and made an edit. Basic knowledge capture has happened already. But possibly the place or wording of the new knowledge is not ideal. Before you know it, another process participant improves the original change by rewording or shifting the new content. This is all done without meetings or intervention of big kahunas. You will start to see your processes and their docs improve as if by magic: wiki magic.
Our current system is word - copies emailed around until all are happy with the final outcome, only then is the final copy issued as live for all to read.
Whilst I am desperate to move away from this old Word system I don't want to end up with documents that are being edited on a regular basis that have to be amended back if someone disagrees! I used Lotus 9000 once which was good for this (but not so great in many other respects!)
Regarding office vs wiki, see
What is the point of a wiki.
Editing on a regular basis is really quite beneficial in a wiki. The seldom needed reverts are easy, and, of course, your process owners can and should have the last word. But this can be accomplished procedurally with much less effort than you imagine, and to the great benefit of quick improvement.
. I too have spoken to our IT guys about Sharepoint, and we have the enterprise version and can use Sharepoint to build a Wiki, but there are 1 or 2 bits of functionality i'm not sure it does, including ability to export wiki content to pdf/word files, ability to auto-generate wiki pages from the existing content in our [current] Word masters, etc.
