Thursday morning,
Publicis Consultants | and
Atlassian - the company who created
Confluence co-organized the
Atlassian User Group in Paris, at the Club Publicis, an amazing vintage theater located in Publicis Groupe HQ. These events are always an incredible opportunity to have updates about the products of Atlassian and to hear other users talking about the way they use Confluence in their company.
4 speakersTo begin the AUG Paris,
Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian shared the next milestones of Atlassian development, the opening of a new office in Amsterdam notably. On the products side, the Confluence next version improvements should be focused on the search engine capacities and the WYSIWYG interface. The release date is not set yet.
Then, Mohamed Benyahia and Alexei Barantsev explained how Confluence is used at
Ingenico, a french-based worldwide company specialized in secure transactions solutions and operating in 100 countries: mainly to share and secure their programs and sub-programs codes between programmers, marketing forces and customers. Alexei concluded his speech saying how pleased he was to use Confluence as employees did not need any training: "Confluence is as easy to use as Microsoft Word" Alexei said. I assume I felt a bit jealous at this point of the conference ;-)
My presentation was mainly about what's it's like to use a Confluence wiki in a "recently born non-tech worldwide network" selling time rather than products and its impacts on adoption process. I tried to highlight successes and failures in the fieds of implementation, organizing and sharing informations, and socialization within users.
François Nonnemmacher explained how SFR, the n°2 french mobile phone operator, is now using a Confluence instance for its customer support center receiving 100,000 calls a day. I was interested in particuliar on the methodology employed to help employees to work in a new collaborative way. All the presentations should be available
here shortly.
Tons of questionsAccording to Jeffey Walker, the Q&A session was the most impressive part of the conference. Even if the AUG Paris is the 20th group since the beginning of AUG, Jeffrey never been in such an interactive group. Across the tons of questions, I wanted to highlights 4 points that interested me:
Hierarchy?
I understand a large majority of users does not feel confortable without contents sorted in files like in the Windows Explorer / Mac Finder app. And I hear they would like to find more structured content in the wiki. But. Let's go back a couple of years before now. In the early 1996-1998, Yahoo! tried to organize and structure the Internet
in a big directory. They failed because of the increase of contents available on the web. The directory was impossible to be kept up to date. It's one of the main reasons of Google success. No directory. No organization.
Just a search box. The question asked by Google was : "Do you need the structure or the content?". You know the answer, right?
It's all the same for the wiki. In a Confluence space, all the pages are stored at the same level. They may be organized with the children feature or - best - with the label system but users should create and edit valuable content rather than designing overview portals. This job has been outsourced to the search engine a long time ago. Everyone should keep in mind all the amazing experiences had with Google, finding easily content, and compare them to the nightmares you went through browsing the files of your local (C:\) searching a Powerpoint: your life on wikis will never be the same.
Design?
In the same way, there is a growing gap between interrogations about the look & feel between techies and casual users. Most of techies in the room agreed to find the Confluence lay-out pretty cool. Most of users agrees to find the Confluence Lay-out pretty ugly. A major difficulty was identified in look & feel customization: the price. As the customization of a wiki represents an important work and that work may have to be done each time we upgrade the wiki, this look & feel issue could become an important hidden cost. What else can be said?
Garderners?
A very interesting question was about the role of
Gardeners in the wiki adoption process. As many participants stressed the centric role of the Gardeners, one guy backed up the opposite advice: if there are Gardeners in a wiki, that means users won't feel responsible of the quality of content they contributed to create. That's why there should not be any Gardener on a wiki but a strong "content freshness policy". Interesting, no?
Socialization?
I was suprised to see few talks about socialization. As most of the wiki are used for information storage and sharing, the question of socialization between co-workers (based on business practices or geographical area) have been neglected. Is it an issue? Is it a bit idealistic to imagine a full platoon of workers lauching an internal blog on the wiki to share knowledge and experience when you know most of them are hired to give time and expertise to clients and projects?
I would be really glad to have your comments about this.
