Collaboration Through Wikis at Hicks Morley

Heather Colman has a piece on the use of wikis at her Canadian firm, Hicks Morley, published on LLRX.com: Collaboration Through Wikis at Hicks Morley.

I had the pleasure of meeting Heather back in October and heard her presentation on the selection and adoption of wikis at her law firm.

Since our successful launch, 768 pages, 384 links and 530 internal shortcuts have been added by individual users. The most surprising statistic is that 1,445 documents have been added as attachments. This illustrates the wiki’s overall appeal including its use as a mini Document Management system. ThoughtFarmer has become an effective replacement for the cumbersome Shared Drive. The statistics highlight how easy it is for users, including lawyers, to add pages and content. The automatic navigational structure, search engine and ‘browse by tags’ functionality makes it easier and faster to find information resulting in a substantial drop in the number of email queries. The Intranet has also become a Personal Knowledge Management enabler with many lawyers using their profiles to store personal precedent collections, articles, presentations, speaking notes, etc.

Knowledge Management in a 2.0 World

My latest article has been published in National, the magazine of the Canadian Bar Association: Knowledge Management in a 2.0 World.(.pdf)

It’s never been more important for lawyers and law firms to be able to organize and access all their knowledge. And thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis, it’s also never been easier. Welcome to the next generation of KM.

I take no credit for the French translation of the article. My french is not that good.

Firm Directories and Privacy

The Human Resources group at your firm has lots information about you. They probably publish a portion of that information to your internal photo-directory. Have they just violated some privacy laws? Can a 2.0 directory avoid the violation.

The European Union has much stricter limits on privacy than the United States. [See 31995L0046 EU Directive 95/46/EC] The EU prohibits the publication of an electronic directory with any "personal data" which is broadly defined as any reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity.

The big exception is when the data is published after the "data subject's consent." There is much thought that a request by an employer to an employee is inherently coersive. (Are you afraid of losing your job if you do not submit the information.)

It seems that a wiki-like directory could solve the consent issue. You could publish the directory with just basics, name and phone number. The employee can then add whatever information they want. There is consent, because the employee voluntarily took the time to add the information.The stored history of the wiki page can show who added the information.

There are a few prohibited areas under the EU Directive: revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, and data concerning health or sex life. You would want those excluded from a company directory in anyhow.

Maybe you should rethink your company directory? What are your thoughts?

Knowledge Management and the Paperless Practice Toolkit

I presented on knowledge management as part of the Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education program: The Paperless Practice Toolkit: Taming the Technology Tiger

The panel was me and the two former attorneys at Goodwin Procter: James J. Berriman, Esq., of Evidox Corporation and Mark R. Mansoor, Esq., ClosingBinders.com.

I focused on search tools, wikis and cloud computing.  The audience was expecting the talk about search, but I think I really caught them off guard with my presentation on wikis and cloud computing. I fit those topics in by pointing out that if you are going paperless that means you are going digital. If you are going digital, there are new and better ways to create your documents and to store them.

The PowerPoint slide deck is below. After you play PowerPoint karaoke, you can view the slides with my notes over JD supra and see what I was talking about with the various images: The Paperless Practice Toolkit: Knowledge Management.

Paperless Practice Toolkit: Knowledge Management

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: km knowledge)

Enterprise 2.0 Progress Report

We have continue to wiki-fy content at The Firm.  SharePoint treats wiki pages as documents and gives them high rankings in search results. They are quickly becoming the preferred way to capture information and knowledge in the firm.

The SharePoint wiki tool is simple, but that makes it easy to teach people how to use. Everyone who has actually used the wiki is stunned at how easy it is to edit.

Here is the latest count of wiki pages:

	June 6	July 7	Sept. 15
Wiki Page	205	313	667

I am staggered at the amount of content flowing into the wikis.

I am using the number of wiki pages as an indicator of adoption. Ideally, I would like to be able to pull the total number of versions of wiki pages. That could be a better indicator of usage because it would show the total number of edits to pages, not just the number of pages. So far I have not been able to find a way to get a report on this from SharePoint.

Does anyone know a way to find that information in SharePoint?

Wikis and Document Management Systems

Versions of this article appeared as

Which Route?

KM Legal, Volume 2 Issue 4, June 2008
http://www.kmlegalmag.com/coverfeature

EI Case study: Wiki versus DMS at Goodwin Procter

Inside Knowledge, Volume 11 Issue 8
http://www.ikmagazine.com/

The document management system has long been the factory assembly line for most big law firms.  In turn, the document management system becomes the largest searchable repository of knowledge in a law firm.  With the rise of enterprise 2.0 technologies and their alignment with knowledge management, the question arises how these new technologies might affect the use of existing technologies, like the document management system.  One of the most promising enterprise 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is the wiki. 

Definition of a Wiki

At its core, a wiki is a collection of editable pages on the web.  Each time a wiki page is edited and saved, a new version is created.  Also, when the wiki page is saved, the wiki platform will send out a notification of the changes to subscribers to that wiki page.  A typical feature of the wiki platform is that it is easy to compare changes between any two versions of a wiki page.

Wikipedia is the most famous wiki.  Wikipedia.org is a web-based, free content encyclopedia project.  This site is based on a wiki platform, open for anyone to add content or edit existing content.  With over 9 million articles in more than 250 languages, and over 2.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is several times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.  One key step that Wikipedia took was to eliminate any requirement of registration to add or edit content.  Anyone can anonymously edit wiki pages in Wikipedia.  Rarely would a firm allow for anonymous editing of wiki used within the firm.  Most wiki platforms deployed inside a firm's firewall will allow a single sign-on so the editor is recognized from their initial sign-on to the network.

Wikis are attractive as a knowledge management tool because they it make very easy to contribute content and easy to find the content.  Most wikis offer an easy to use "What You See Is What You Get" page editor that resembles a simple word-processing program.  Since the wiki content is in the form of a web page most search engines can easily index and search the contents of the wiki.

Definition of a Document Management System

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents.  Those electronic documents can include word-processing documents, presentations, scanned documents, spreadsheets and a variety of document formats.

A typical DMS will automatically tag the document with a specific reference identification.  This identification allows for immediate retrieval of the document.  The DMS will allow (or require) you to add metadata about the document.  For law firms, that metadata will typically include a designation of the client and the particular matter for the client.  This allows you to search for a document based on specific criteria about the document in addition to the text of the document.

The DMS will also allow you to add security to the document, so it can be private to the individual, limited to the matter team, limited to the client or to exclude specific people (as may be required for ethical purposes).  The DMS allows you to store multiple versions of a particular document so that you can track the edits to the document.

A DMS succeeds because it offers more functionality than the user would have from saving the document to a standard drive.  The DMS offers greater searching and categorization of documents.  The unique identification marker on the document allows you to quickly identify the exact document in question.  This identification is much shorter than the long file folder designation you would get from a file located on a standard drive.  The DMS can also easily be tied into the word-processing software.  In the end it easy to contribute to the DMS and easy to find content in the DMS.

DMS and Wikis at Goodwin Procter

Almost a decade ago at the beginning of my firm's knowledge management group, one of the first action items was the selection of iManage (now Interwoven's Worksite product) as the firm's DMS.  We now have over 8 million documents in the DMS.  Nearly all of the documents produced by the lawyers and staff in the firm are stored in the DMS. 

Our existing intranet is built on Microsoft's SharePoint 2003 platform.  A great deal of the content on the intranet is merely links to documents in the DMS.  Users update content by opening and editing the content in the DMS.  That shields them from the clunkier web editing and process on the existing intranet. It also allows them to use the version control features of the DMS to trace the history of the document and its content.

Over the past year, we have been planning and implementing an upgrade of our intranet to Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 platform.  Wikis, blogs and some other enterprise 2.0 tools are included as part of SharePoint 2007 platform.  At the outset of planning for our upgrade, we decided to actively use some of these tools to see how they worked.  In particular, wikis caught our attention as a great tool for knowledge management within the firm.  I used the free test version of PBWiki for a variety of projects:  managing our knowledge management projects, co-authoring an article on social networking, planning a conference, managing transactions for a client, preparing and gathering the results of a survey of law firm knowledge management leaders, and gathering definitions of knowledge management. 

Comparison of Functionality

In comparing the features of a wiki and the features of a DMS, a wiki combines more of the features in the document production process into one package.  A wiki has a basic word processing program, with a simple editor for creating content.  The wiki has a flat list of wiki pages within the wiki platform.  (Although some wiki platforms do allow for greater organization.)  The wiki has the ability to compare changes between versions of a wiki page.  The wiki has a notification process that alerts subscribers to the wiki page when changes or additions occur.

The wiki combines features of a word-processing program, a DMS, a document comparison program and an email program into one package.  Of course, a wiki does not have all of the bells and whistles that these four programs do.

The strength of the DMS lies in it rich metadata collection, version control and security.  Within a law firm, it is important to be able to retrieve all of the documents for a particular client or for a particular matter for a client.  And perhaps even more important is the ability to apply security limitations to documents for a particular client or matter.   For example, a document for public company merger would have security applied to limit viewing to the matter team in an effort to avoid the disclosure of the transaction.

Document Behaviors

A wiki and DMS are both focused on producing, storing and sharing content.  A wiki page is just another type of document.  When producing content, I have noted five types of behaviors:  collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.  In a collaborative scenario, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.  With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content.  With iterative, there is single author controlling changes to the document.  The document may have originated from another source, but stands on its own as a separate instance of content.  With competitive content creation, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content.  However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters.  Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit.  Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors.  Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors.  Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

Typical Behaviors With a DMS

The principal behavior for use of content in he DMS is iterative.  Lawyers will search for and reuse existing content in a DMS.  But rarely will they change an existing document.  Generally, a document in the DMS was drafted for a particular issue for a particular client.  They reuse existing content, but create a new iteration of that content.  Lawyers will work collaboratively in drafting documents, but the process is iterative.  They draft the document with some collaboration with their assistant in finalizing and editing the draft.  The draft is circulated for comments.  Then the lawyer creates a new iteration of the document as a new version of the document in the DMS.  The lawyer then incorporates the changes they accept, finalize this new draft and circulate again.

The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.  A junior person will generally want to hide interim drafts and issues from the senior person.  The junior person is looking to impress and move up in the firm.  The same behavior is typical with a client.  The client is expecting vetted, finished work for their review and comment.  With a lawyer-client relationship there is the additional and important issue of liability for mistakes resulting in possible malpractice and personal liability for the lawyer. 

Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents.  Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner.


Typical Behaviors with a Wiki

I have seen two principal behaviors in using wikis.  The first is accretive.  With this behavior, the person will add content to the wiki, but not update or edit existing content.  This is largely the learned behavior from email.  The second behavior is collaborative, where the person will add content, but also edit existing content. 

The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together.  With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same wiki page, effectively editing the document.  With iterative behavior, the lawyer creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

When to Use a Document in the DMS

The traditional DMS process is best used when the production of content is adversarial, rather than collaborative.  Generally all discussions between opposing counsel are adversarial, even in transactional law.  With collaborative behavior in a typical wiki, there is no control over the addition or editing of content, other than responding to edits or locking the wiki page from editing.  You give up the control of authoriship.  Most of the bad behavior stories from wikipedia come from an adversarial editing process.  A robust infrastructure has grown as part of wikipedia to deal with adversarial editing.

The DMS is the better repository for documents that enter a competitive or adversarial behavior.  The lawyer will want a record of what was contained in each version of the document as the content was changed by the author.

When to Use a Wiki

The question is what content in the law firm should you "wiki-fy"?

Of the document behaviors, a wiki is an exceptional platform for collaborative treatment of documents.  Ownership of the document is less important than the collection of the content into one synthesized place.

One great use of a wiki is to replace a practices and procedures manual.  One of the first questions I hear when a group creates a practices and procedures manual is how will they know when it changes.  The typical behavior is to draft the manual in a word processing program, save it into the DMS, then email the group when it is complete.  The recipient will then print it out or refer back to the email when using the manual.  With the manual in a wiki, the notification of changes happens as soon as the change is made.  The manual becomes an active flow of information rather than the republishing of a manual.

I had some success using a wiki to manage the internal closing agendas for a client with several transactions occurring in the office at any one time.  Instead of one person needing to control the edits, the entire client team can update any closing agenda at any time.  When viewing the wiki page, it will always be the most up-to date location of information.  As changes are made to an agenda, the wiki platforms sends out a notification of the change to the entire internal client team.  The DMS behavior would be to maintain the closing agenda in a word-processing document.  A single person would be responsible for keeping it up to date (usually the most junior person).  After an edit or a group of edits, the author would email the updated agenda to the client team, who would then have to discern changes or eschew a version full of the marked changes.  The wiki collapses the document process into a shorter series of steps and provides a richer flow of information.

Wiki While You Work

As law firms begin implementing wikis, they will need to identify the best way to use this new tool.  Wikis can simplify the production of content by reducing the number of programs and the steps needed to produce the content.  Although they are not appropriate for all types of content, they are an excellent tool to add to your knowledge management program.

DMS and Collaboration Suite: Friends not Foes

Michael Idinopulos published a great piece on his SocialText blog: DMS and Collaboration Suite: Friends not Foes.  (It reminded me that I never published my Wikis and Document Management Systems piece. I have it set to publish tommorrow.)

"When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records."

Effective Wiki Uses

Stewart Mader put together a list of 5 Effective Wiki Uses over at Website Magazine.com:

1. Project Management
2. Customer/Client Collaboration
3. Documentation
4. Online Community
5. Policies, FAQ, Guidelines and Best Practices

Here at The Firm we currently have four uses for wikis:

First, we are using them as a classic encyclopedia, similar to the Wikipedia model.  We start a wiki page for a substantive legal topic, seed it with information and ask others to edit and add to the information.  It is easy to link a topic page to other related topics.

Second, we are using the wiki as a lightweight content management tool.  We are replacing hard-to-edit conventional web pages with wiki pages.  This use is largely focused on administrative information that can be edited and updated by those who know and are responsible for the content.  We are removing the barrier of having to go through IT or an intranet editor to update their content. The individual subject matter experts can update the information themselves.

Third, we are using wikis to manage clients.  Rather than keeping a client's practices and procedures manual in a word document or three-ring binder, we "wikify" it.  The individual sections of the manual get their own wiki page in the wiki library.  Also, each case/matter for the client gets a separate wiki page in the wiki library.  On the case/matter's wiki page, we maintain the status of the matter, with key notes and items to be completed.

Fourth, we use wiki pages to manage administrative projects.  Each project gets an wiki page. On that page we list the items to be done, the milestones to be achieved and the links to other relevant information.  On the page you can get a background, see how the project has evolved, where it is headed and its current status.  This works much better than a folder full of e-mails.

Live Wiki-ing Meetings

You readers know that I routinely blog from conferences as way to keep my notes and share them with you (and myself). [see: ILTA 2007, ILTA 2008, Legal Tech 2008 Enterprise 2.0 2007, Enterprise 2008]  The other day I realized I was doing a better job capturing external sessions than internal sessions.

I was sitting in a practice area meeting taking notes on substantive legal issues. We were coming up with best practices and discussing some traps for the unwary. I looked down at my barely legible handwriting and I think I actually saw the light bulb. My notebook practically slammed itself shut. I sprinted back to my office and grabbed my laptop. On the sprint back, I thought I would put the notes on my internal blog: Real KM. But then I thought this substance would be better off being synthesized in our newly launched topics wiki. During the rest of practice area meeting, I typed the notes and final thoughts of the group into a wiki page for that topic. At the end of the meeting, I sent an email to the practice area with a link to the wiki page with an invitation to edit my notes.

Best of all, the partner who led the practice area meeting edited the wiki page.

Ahhhhh, the sweet smell of success.

Beyond Wikis and Blogs

We are continuing to roll out wikis at The Firm and getting ready to push out internal blogs. Wikis are rapidly gaining traction at The Firm. We now have more wiki pages than conventional web pages on our intranet.

With this success, I am thinking ahead to what is coming next. An article by Ashley Jones in E Content Magazine gave me some ideas: Studies Suggest That Enterprise Social Media Will Change the Face of Business.

Though many companies already have enterprise-wide wikis and blogs to promote collaboration, enterprise social networking brings something a little different to the table. "We’re huge fans of wikis and blogs, but they don’t do a good job of helping users find those people who would be interested in collaborating in a wiki in the first place," notes [Peter Biddle, VP of development for Trampoline, which offers its SONAR suite—a portal delivered via API that provides tools for employees to locate experts, connect, and collaborate.]

Law Firm Adoption of Web 2.0

Continuing my live-blogging from International Legal Technology Association's Annual Conference. . .  As Web2.0 tools mature, there is an increased number of adoptions by Fortune 500 companies. We explore and learn if Web 2.0 solutions already being adapted by Fortune 500 companies would be accepted by the lawyers in your firm.

Speaker: Bruce MacEwen of AdamSmithEsq.com

Bruce is cautious optimist about the adoption of the these tools. He sees the most important change from Web 1.,0 when you surfed, to Web 1.5, when you searched, and to Web 2.0 when you share.

He thinks they have a real place as a management tools in professional services firm. They have so many advantages over email [See Luis Suarez's approach on Elsua.net]. Of course there are rules of the road.  He pointed to IBM's Social Computing Guidelines. He recognizes that HR and PR will be concerned about the loss of control and approval.

An audience member focused on the comment function.  Bruce has seen it. But he thinks it is a defensive position. On his own site, Bruce gets 10 personal emails for every comment. I pointed out that legal blogs are not that interesting and do not get that many comments.

Bruce went through DOs and DON'Ts for blogging. (You can see them in the session materials.) Bruce views blogs as a way to prove expertise. You can say you are an expert. But you need to prove it. He also sees blogs as a great tool for knowledge management.

Bruce also sees a strength for a blog to be in project management. The reverse chronological nature of blog lends itself nicely to project management. You are typically interested in the latest piece of information. A blog displays the most recent post at the top.

Bruce moved on to wikis. A wiki is just a blog with lots of authors.  Wikipedia does not work in theory, it only works in practice. Vandalism fears are unfounded. Are your people going to vandalize your reception area? No, so why would they vandalize a firm wiki.

He cited the case of Dresdner where the introduction of wikis reduced email traffic by 75%.

He cited another case study (You can see them in the session materials.) The company rolled out six internal group blogs with 150 contributors. It worked because it is very intuitive. They are much like the way people think. People do not think in structured information like databases. They think unstructured like wikis and blogs.  You also have the update features, the categorization and easy searches.

Bruce moved on to mashups. He focused first on companies use of Google Maps.He showed an example of locating key clients on a Google Map. So if you are out of the office with some free time, the attorney could quickly see if there are any key clients nearby.

He calls Web 2.0 not "Hi-Tech," but "Appropriate Tech." The tools are easy to use tools that allow you to easily share information.

Bruce is more cautious than optimistic on social networks. He thinks they have intriguing opportunities. He thinks MySpace is appalling.  He sees LinkedIn as still being scattered.

He thinks if anything is going to work in the legal field it is Legal OnRamp. He has a concerns that it is getting too big. He cited the natural connection limit of 150 people. It is hard to know more than 150 people. He also did not like the presence feature on  Legal OnRamp. He found it creepy.  

Bruce is still striving to find success stories. He sees much more proven success inside law firms than the deployment outside firms. The McKinsey report on Web 2.0 showed much success in the corporate world.

The power of the tools is to form and strengthen networks.  But it does require the business side to engage with IT on development and for IT to look over the horizon. 

To end, he played this video, Information R/evolution by Michael Wesch:


A great presentation and insight from Bruce.


Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

Wikis in Law Firms - Video Preview

The folks at Westblog.net did a video interview of me just prior to the start of my Wikis in Law Firms presentation at  International Legal Technology Association's Annual Conference. You can see it at the Westblog: Using Wikis in Law Firms,

or just watch it here below:




My ILTA Schedule

Wikis in Law Firms

Wikipedia has over 2,000,000 articles created and edited by users. Can you have a wikipedia for the knowledge inside your law firm? Wikis provide an easy to use platform for capturing content and facilitating collaboration. This session will discuss some of the technical, cultural and procedural issues you need to address in setting up wikis for your law firm.

In the true wiki spirit, the panel has established a wiki in connection with the session. Feel free to logon to the wiki, explore and edit: http://iltawikisinlawfirms.pbwiki.com
The invite key is: ilta08

Speakers:

• Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney at Goodwin Procter LLP
• Michael Mills, Director of Professional Services at Davis Polk & Wardwell
• Ayelette Robinson, Practice Resources Attorney at Morrison & Foerster LLP

My Notes:
Since I was one of the speakers, I did not take notes. But I did not have to. Everything the panel spoke about and more is on the wiki site we set up for the panel: http://iltawikisinlawfirms.pbwiki.com.  Feel free to explore the wiki.

Thanks to PBwiki for giving us the wiki upgrade for the panel.

PBwiki is the world's largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis. We host over 500,000 wikis, serve millions of users per month, and 96% of our business users would recommend PBwiki to a friend.

Leading companies from AT&T to Wal-Mart, including 1/3 of the Fortune 500, choose PBwiki to help them with knowledge management, collaboration, project management, and a host of other business processes and workflows.

My ILTA Schedule

What to Do with Sharepoint Wikis

I have expressed my displeasure with the Sharepoint Wikis: Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.  We have been looking at wiki platforms to replace or supplement the Sharepoint wikis. One platform is Atlassian's Confluence. These are the answer we received for a few of our questions:

Thanks for your interest in our award-winning enterprise wiki, Confluence. Sorry for the delay in responding, but we released Confluence 2.9 today and I wanted to wait and reply after the release because some of the new features may be very appealing to you. Based on your requirements, I think that Confluence could be a very good fit for your law firm.

Email notifications of the changes

Yes, highlighting or only showing the changes to the page itself;
Yes, Confluence allows users to 'watch' pages (or entire spaces) and then sends you an e-mail every time they are updated. The e-mails themselves contain the page and a link to the page where you can easily view the most recent changes. The changes are presented in a nice format highlighting both what has been deleted and what has been added.

Here is a quick overview: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/oCAC

Confluence also allows the creation of custom RSS feeds that allow users to subscribe to certain pages, spaces and blogs and lets them check the updates at their discretion without filling up their inboxes. 

Checkout on editing

Confluence has very strong capabilities in this area. If a user clicks to edit a page that is concurrently being edited by another user, they will be notified. Confluence can automatically merge their changes if the two users edit different parts of the page. If there are any conflicts, Confluence will display them for you and give you the option to either 'Overwrite' the other user's changes, 'Merge your changes' manually, or 'Discard' them.

Our page describing this functionality is here:http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/TzUC

Confluence also has very fine grained permissioning, meaning that you can easily restrict which individuals and groups can view or edit a page. 

Integration with Sharepoint / MOSS 2007.

Microsoft is embracing partners who are leaders in Web 2.0 technologies and so we had SharePoint Connector designed. This plugin allows for integration between Confluence and SharePoint on multiple levels. You can embed SharePoint content on a Confluence page, create links between the different programs, run searches among content on both programs and more.

You can see the homepage for the connector here:http://www.atlassian.com/sharepoint/default.jsp The documentation for the SharePoint Connector offers more comprehensive information on the product: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/9AHrBQ

Today, we also release a free plugin called the Office Connector. This makes it easy to convert MS Word documents into Confluence pages and also to embed Excel and PowerPoint content. I'd highly recommend watching the video on its homepage: http://www.atlassian.com/office/

Has your law firm tried an evaluation of Confluence yet? You can download a free 30-day evaluation and see how it works from: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ConfluenceDownloadCenter.jspa

It sounds like they are addressing the holes we have found in SharePoint wikis.

Stewart Mader Launches a New Venture

I had the chance to sit down with Stewart Mader and Matt Moore to talk about Enterprise 2.0 and wikis in particular: Enterprise 2.0 Discussion with Stewart Mader, Matt Moore and Doug Cornelius.   There was also bit of discussion of location based social computing (is it as good as dog urine?) and bit more in a separate podcast on social bonds and salty language.

Stewart just let me know he is branching out in a new venture and sent me this information:

"Grow Your Wiki" Grows into Specialist Consultancy

Today, I'm taking the wraps off something I've been working on for a long time.Grow Your Wiki is growing - into a specialist consultancy focused on organizational wiki adoption.

This is as much a launch of something new, as the continuation of something I've been doing for a long time. I built my first wiki in 2003, for science curriculum, and building The Science of Spectroscopy showed me the amazing capability of a wiki to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in its creation, growth, and use.

Since then, I've been working with organizations to introduce wikis for internal collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. I've done it both as a full-time job, at Emerson College and Brown University, and as a consultant for a number of other organizations. In late 2006,Atlassian (makers of the Confluence wiki) as their Wiki Evangelist, and have continued to evangelize the benefits of wiki use in an organizational context at conferences, on blogs, and in my latest bookWikipatterns. I've also continued to work with an even broader range of organizations on their wiki adoption efforts.

In the past several months, I've been fielding more and more questions from organizations that want to know how to get wiki adoption going the right way. I believe that to make wiki adoption successful and fully realize its benefits, they really need a good plan for managed growth that takes into account their size, history of enterprise software use (or misuse!), ensures people get the most out of their wiki use, and helps minimize performance and efficiency issues related to too-rapid growth.

So, I'm launching this new venture to focus all my energy on helping organizations get the most out of their investment in wikis as a collaboration, knowledge sharing, project & meeting management, and communication platform.

To that end, I'll be leaving the full-time employ of Atlassian as of this Friday, August 15th. I'll continue to work part-time on some special projects for the company until the end of September.

If you're looking to grow wiki use in your organization, I'd love to help you plan a strategy for managed growth. You can use the contact form to get in touch, and I'll get back to you within two business days.

--
Stewart Mader
Grow Your Wiki - www.ikiw.org

Stewart also sent along this tidbit on his four steps to successful wiki adoption (.pdf).

Web 2.0 for Professional Development

On Friday, the Professional Development Consortium invited me to co-lead some table discussions on Web 2.0 for professional development.  The PDC is a group for those "working in-house at law firms, government agencies and corporations who are charged with the responsibility of developing and administering the training and professional development for lawyers."

Chris Boyd and I led two discussions on  how web 2.0 tools can help with professional development. We started off using Jessica Lipnack's technique of asking the audience to introduce themselves and why they were here. The topic was only briefly described and very open-ended, so Chris and I were prepared to talk about a wide range of use of Web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 tools. Most of the audience claimed ignorance of web 2.0, but wanted to learn more. Most did not know what a wiki was.

Chris and I started off with a few examples of how wikis can be used:

• Chris and I use an external wiki to help communicate and organize information for ILTA's Knowledge Management Peer Group's Steering Committee. 
• I am using a wiki to plan a meeting of Toronto and New York law firm knowledge management leaders.
• I use a wiki to manage one of my client teams.  
• My knowledge management department uses a wiki to manage our projects. 

We gave the audience a handout containing the wikis and happiness picture and my Wiki While You Work article published by ILTA. Most of the discussion focused on using wikis to help manage their own internal projects.  I think the instigation was the wikis and happiness picture showing the differences between using email to collaborate and a wiki to collaborate.

The audience really grabbed onto the concepts. We turned tables of skeptics in tables of bobbing heads by the end.  Chris ran into one of the participants at dinner that night. She had already gone back to her room, built a wiki on PBwiki and announced it to her group.  I think the session was a great success.

Thanks to Bridget Huffstutler and Scott Westfahl for inviting me to the PDC Conference. A big thanks to my co-presenter, Chris Boyd.

Wiki While You Work

In the latest knowledge management white paper from the International Legal Technology Association is an article authored by me: Wiki While You Work [pdf]. There are some other great articles in the white paper. Here is the table of contents:

• Collaboration and Competitiveness: New Tools for Collaborating and Managing Knowledge By Guy Wiggins of Keely Dry & Warren LLP
• Wiki While You Work by Doug Cornelius
• Show Them the Value! Using KM to Bring More Value to Clients by Mary F. Panetta of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, L.L.P.
• Developing Document Assembly Tools: A Tale of Two Applications by Eric Little of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, PC
• 2008 ILTA KM Survey Results by Catherine Monte of Fox Rothschild LLP and Mara Nickerson of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP

Enterprise 2.0 Progress Report

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 9
wiki pages: 313, which is a 50% increase over the past month's 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we deal with some issues. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

We are still suffering from the wiki's failure to show the changes to the wiki page as part of the notification. [See Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.]

I Freed Myself From Email's Grip

Unfortunately not me, but my pal Luis Suarez. There is a profile of Luis in the New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  Luis describes how he started using platform communication tools like blogs and wikis instead of email. He managed to reduce his email traffic by 80% and still effectively communicate with his colleagues.

"Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes."

Universal Edit Button

For those of you using RSS feeds, you have grown used to seeing the orange icon appear whenever you are on a site with a feed. Now there is a universal edit icon if you are on a page that is publicly editable. (If you use the Firefox brower).

"The Universal Editing Button (UEB) will allow a web surfer to more quickly recognize when a site may be edited. It will be a convenience to web surfers who are already inclined to contribute, and an invitation to those who have yet to discover the thrill of building a common resource. As this kind of public editing becomes more commonplace, the button may become regarded as a badge of honor. It may serve as an incentive to encourage companies and site developers to add publicly-editable components to their sites, in order to have the UEB displayed for their sites.

In these ways, we hope that this button catalyzes the acceleration of the editable web, and helps accelerate society's trend toward building valued common resources."

I just downloaded the Firefox extension and it seems to work great. Now I am off to edit.

Thanks to Lily Hill of Digital Advocate for pointing this out (via Twitter: @lilyhill) from Marshall Kilpatrick of Read Write Web: Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button.