Wednesday Aug 01, 2007
The blog about what it takes to build a popular site by engineers, for engineers. Learn from a battle tested team that built a successful communication and collaboration platform supporting a community of 10,000 of Sun's ~34,000
employees, generating over 15,000 hits/day.
Wednesday Aug 01, 2007
There are @3200 CEpedia users, @2500 OneStop users and many of them (you?) want to know what's happening with those 2 systems and what is CE 2.0.
Right about now most non-Sun employees may have tuned out, but just bear with me for a moment here and it might be worth your while (and if it isn't, what a wonderful opportunity to flame me, or whatever the current term is!)
Basically CEpedia and OneStop are 2 different systems we use at Sun to try and improve the information sharing within our customer-facing technical community. There's alot of information in most of their heads and/or laptops, and we are constantly trying to help them share it with each other so that our customers benefit - better answers to their questions such as "how would I..." or "have you ever...?"
OneStop today is a typical website - a collection of html pages which are editable by their owners. Terrific content because of the passion and knowledge of their owners/authors, but sometimes a little out of date because those authors are either busy solving customer challenges or else working on new Sun products/services/solutions.
CEpedia is a wiki we established a year ago to support our Customer Engineers (CEs) - kind of like Wikipedia (do i need a tm here?) for CEs. It has the advantage of wikis - easy to update by anyone who can access, so it can be kept very much up to date.
Now if I haven't lost the non-Sun audience, here's where I think it gets more interesting. Our plan is to:
Right about now most non-Sun employees may have tuned out, but just bear with me for a moment here and it might be worth your while (and if it isn't, what a wonderful opportunity to flame me, or whatever the current term is!)
Basically CEpedia and OneStop are 2 different systems we use at Sun to try and improve the information sharing within our customer-facing technical community. There's alot of information in most of their heads and/or laptops, and we are constantly trying to help them share it with each other so that our customers benefit - better answers to their questions such as "how would I..." or "have you ever...?"
OneStop today is a typical website - a collection of html pages which are editable by their owners. Terrific content because of the passion and knowledge of their owners/authors, but sometimes a little out of date because those authors are either busy solving customer challenges or else working on new Sun products/services/solutions.
CEpedia is a wiki we established a year ago to support our Customer Engineers (CEs) - kind of like Wikipedia (do i need a tm here?) for CEs. It has the advantage of wikis - easy to update by anyone who can access, so it can be kept very much up to date.
Now if I haven't lost the non-Sun audience, here's where I think it gets more interesting. Our plan is to:
- merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
- We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted
- Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.
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