The work continues

I've been adding pages to the wiki. Personnel and "Important Documents."

Training with co-workers went well. So far, their contributions vary from person to person, but we seem to be rather quickly finding a common language for the wiki. They've also provided some good input for systems of organization.

pushin' on

The wiki is up and running. I'm now just adding to it daily from the files in the clients system. Next week I'm going to present the wiki to a handful of employees and let them being adding to it, so I have started putting together a very simple presentation regarding the nuts-and-bolts of how to create and edit documents, as well as document and file name formatting.

Success

Previously, there were some issues with the IT staff getting a wiki set up. After working through some security concerns, we were finally able to install a wiki engine to get an in-house wiki up and running.

After shopping around various engines, I selected dokuwiki. It is fully functional, and is very simple to use, both from an administrative point of view as well as for users. On the user front, just a few minutes of training can have anyone comfortable w/ word processing able to create and edit pages. This is especially important, as the client hopes to have a small number of people using the wiki.

I spent the morning transferring pages on Important People from an html format to the wiki, so now the thing is starting to take shape.

The next step will be to add users and ensure that security settings are all lined up so that particular people have varying degrees of access to the wiki.

IT issues

The timeline is in a good place. I've got four separate xml files that feed into different bands of the timeline now. It's all hosted on an internal server, which allows working links to a local database, and also keeps the entire thing secure.

I've also created a temporary fix for the Important People situation. I have not yet been able to create a wiki that is acceptable for the scope of this project. Security is the hurdle here. There is a requirement on the part of the client to host everything on a local server, without the possibility for outside access in any form. This is currently problematic, as the IT personnel have not been able to find a way to allow any sort of wiki software to work on more than one actual machine. So right now, I have a system in place where I can build a wiki using python-based software, but my machine is the only one that can access it. Very frustrating.

My work-around is a bunch of single html files on the local server that can act as a basic website for the Important People. It's a temporary fix, and it could work in a pinch, but it loses much of the bells and whistles of a more fully-functional wiki, especially w/r/t edit histories. I expect that finding a way to work around the limitations of my IT problem will take up the better part of the rest of this project.