TWiki evaluation at Max Fordham LLP

About us

Max Fordham LLP is a UK based Engineering Design Consultancy with a reputation for innovation and sustainable building design. We currently have about 150 people, more than half of which are partners in the business. The main office is in London, but we also have small offices in Cambridge and Edinburgh. See http://www.maxfordham.com for further information.

Why we're trying TWiki

I have been evaluating TWiki since April 2007. There are essentially 2 anticipated uses:

• As an engineering Knowledge Base
• As an intranet

I started learning about wikis in "Sharing Knowledge" and TWiki in particular a case study of the architectural firm Feilden Clegg Bradley who have been using TWiki for a number of years. If these links don't work, the pdfs can be download here.

Our current knowledge systems

We have a number of knowledge collecting and sharing systems already, many of which are useful, but they are not integrated and it can be hard to find things if you don't know where they are. The best system is a discussion forum on Lotus Notes. Questions are posted with instant email notification to everyone. You tend to get some good answers, but we have the usual email overlad from this. Also the discussion forum is almost impossible to search, so people keep asking the same questions.

We don't currently have an intranet, but have have a number of Lotus Notes databases providing info on both the company and design issues. However, we don't have Notes development skills in-house and so improvements are slow to happen and many users are frustrated with the system. Also info is rarely updated and users get disillusioned hen they see very out of date info (eg about people who left several years earlier).

The aim of a wiki Knowledge Base and intranet will be a mixture of linking up the existing systems (via hyperlinks) and migrating exiting systems into the wiki so they can be managed and updated more easily.

IT input...or lack of it

I am learning to do TWiki Admin just from the browser side. I am an engineer with no programming skills. I persuaded our IT team to install TWiki to try out, on the basis that they would have very little involvement with running it (we have 2 Systems Administrators and 2 IT Developers, but they are very busy). I'm still not quite sure what the reality will be, but the success of this project for us depends on it needing low IT input. I have none of the skills listed in AdminSkillsAssumptions but am happy to learn, though currently I am not allowed access to the server side as engineers are not to be trusted not to mess things up!!

Evaluation so far (at 4 months)

I have set up a prototype Knowledge Base and have a couple of people helping me. We are transfering some of our existing design info across and will probably run a small pilot soon with a small group. Mostly I have been learning how to use TWiki and just experimenting. From the perspective of a non-programmer, I love how much I can do and create. I have been really enjoying myself and it has become rather addictive. So the admin side is great.

What I am currently a bit nervous about is how acessible it is for occassional users. It is fine once you've committed the time to learn it properly, but if you are a user who mostly browses and reads, and only occassionally edits a page or adds one, then it might seem too complicated, especially as the Edit view looks so flat.

Usability & Plugins

I'm now focussed on usability and customising the front end to make it as easy as possible, as the out-of-the-box version is not simple enough. I'm writing this up at TWikiUsabilityTestingAtMaxFordham. I have identified a number of Plugins that should improve usability for us, but without server access (or skills) I can't try them out. It would be good if there were more screen shots on the Plugin Topic pages as it is quite hard to tel exactly what each one does from the descriptions, and more links to examples would be wonderful. I did persuade an IT colleague to install a few Plugins by saying he only had to unzip them and run the install script, but mostly it wasn't that straightforward. We have got SmartEditAddOn to work first time, but SectionEditPlugin is not working yet.

.....to be continued.

-- TamsinTweddell - 28 Jul 2007