Want a view into how a global company uses a wiki as their intranet? Check out Jason Mawdsley’s article Tools for Distributed Development, which reveals just that and more, including best practices.
Jason works at Macadamian Technologies, where Confluence has become a vital part of their everyday world. The wiki makes it easy and convenient for both team members and partners to interact with each other even though they’re spread across the world. Here’s a little excerpt of his article:
A wiki is a key tool for success with distributed resources. Not only will it answer your global partners’ questions while you’re asleep, it also shows your partners how you go about doing things. A wiki spreads your corporate values in open and subtle ways, showing your partners how you work. This helps your partners incorporate the values of your company into their decision-making process.
This inside look into Macadamian also details how important it is for each project to have its own homepage within the wiki, making information related to that project instantly visible and accessible to everyone. So visible, in fact, that a new employee only has to visit that page to learn all about the project.
In addition to the wiki, Macadamian depends on other web tools, like Skype and, yes, Jira. Jason notes that a good task management system should readily show a project’s status. It should also make it possible to communicate who is responsible for which tasks. Jira is the professional issue tracker developed by us Atlassians. Read the entire article for all the goodies.
