Which Wiki Software is ISO9001 Compliant (Document Control)

[Pancho]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

Pancho,

I understand a significant expense of running a public wiki is protecting it from vandalism.

Do you see the wiki approach to standards-making as feasible?

Contributors, whose input is accepted, may then be able to use the standards for free.

It could widen inputs to standards beyond those who work for large companies and can afford the travel costs for TC176 meetings for example.

Does anyone know of any examples of standards-making (and maintenance) by wiki?

John

Hi John,

I think there is great potential in using wikis for composing and improving standards. A couple of key ingredients would be, in my opinion:

1. Strong leadership by a small group committed to gardening the wiki. This group should have authority and willingness to resolve disputes.
2. A wider, but interested, base of participants. Selection criteria might include having been members of a professional society or industry association for a set period, or known participants in the field, or registered under the standard, etc.

Wikipedia's public nature and public disputes are well known, but in a narrow endeavor, like standard writing or company documentation, the alignment of interests by #2 above make maintenance of the wiki much easier. Still, Wikipedia's Policies and Guidelines and associated pages linked from there are a useful read if you are considering this.

But the guidelines might not be useful with perhaps the biggest challenge: Convincing current committee members. Using a wiki requires quite a shift in thinking by them. Folks that currently hold custody over a master document might feel threatened, and those that don't have experience using wikis might be reluctant to contribute through it.

I do think that any standards committee that gets over the initial hurdles would be rewarded with a rapidly and constantly improving document.

Good luck,
Pancho

 

[Marc]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

Also see: Using a Wiki to implement a Quality Management System (QMS)

 

[QATN11]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

I was on the verge of starting to use wiki to deploy a QMS. Mgt want a cheap (read free) platform that did not require heavy support from the IT dept to keep it up and running. Before I got beyond the initial steps, we departed ways. My concerns with anything free is local support to keep this running, debugging and security. The one I had selected was free and seemed stable. Another department had been using it as a knowledge base for a help desk. All documents were written directly into the wiki screens.

I prefer to keep the documents in Word, Excel and other office apps, but this requires all users having those apps on each PC. Any comments on these pros/cons and general paranoia on my part would be appreciated.

 

[Le Chiffre]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

I went through the same process with documents and records created with MS Office apps, when we put up the wiki. There is a solution that satisfies your situation and will allow for a transition phase or for a hybrid system to persist indefinitely.

Initially our wiki pages were very brief, just reflecting the title of the document with a link to the Office file and perhaps an abstract, author, rev level, etc. or contained a table indexing records, again as links. We migrated slowly to a more wiki-hosted system. To satisfy the requirement for information to be available where required, we made sure Office viewers were installed wherever a full Office license didn't exist.

First, check how easily you can access your document library from a browser and from your wiki. There was some tweeking required to get the wiki to link directly to a shared file server (to recognize a url formatted as "file://"). If everything's accessible via http:// then it's a lot easier and will work on any platform - mobile included.

I also came across a useful Word macro that did a reasonable job of wiki'fying a Word document to help you migrate to a full wiki implementation. A web search should find a free utility.

 

[QATN11]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

Can you share the word macro and elaborate what it does. Thanks for the rest of comments.

 

[Le Chiffre]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

It was an early version of Word2MediaWiki as we chose MediaWiki as our host. The documentation was in German and it did just an ok job. Once you get comfortable with wiki editing you'd probably go without it, but as a starting point it has its uses. I see there's now info on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:WordToWiki
There's probably lots of other options available now...

 

[Peeceepeh]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

Hi! Thank you for sharing you experience. One thing I would like to use is some add-in or the like that find out all pages/documents/entries that haven't been edited for a long time. Do you have any advice for me on how to achieve this?
Thanks!

Peeceepeh

 

[Pancho]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

Hi! Thank you for sharing you experience. One thing I would like to use is some add-in or the like that find out all pages/documents/entries that haven't been edited for a long time. Do you have any advice for me on how to achieve this?
Thanks!

Peeceepeh

Welcome, Peeceepeh!

The wiki that we use, ProjectForum, provides to administrators a list of all pages and the date of their last edit. This list can be sorted by that date to achieve your need. Unfortunately, ProjectForum is being dicontinued as a product, so I wouldn't recommend it. But other wikis should also have this functionality.

 

[Marc]

Re: I need to know which wikis are ISO9001 compliant

Pancho, with ProjectForum being discontinued what are your plans for the future?

 

[Pancho]

The code is pretty stable, so there is no emergency.

We will evntually port our content to another wiki engine. Looking at Confluence, Mediawiki and a few others.