Web 2.0 Trailblazing at Work

Where I work, I've been given the task of exploring the use of Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, forums and other such things to improve internal communications. I started this job after more than a year of blogging here at the 'Post. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I've discovered that it's much more complicated that I had suspected. It's not the tools or technologies that are the big change, it's the culture.

Where I work, we communicate by emailing PowerPoint and Word documents to each other. There are shared drives, but their connectivity is not to be trusted - not everyone can access any of them. I'm trying to simultaneously get us out of using Microsoft Office products and move to a web-based information system. It's a totaly new environment for us, one that has to be explored and tested and played with before we really understand how to use the tools. It's a lot like this.

At the end of this trail, is it something useful or a dead end? Who knows? The only way to find out is to hack your way through the technical and cultural jungle and find out yourself.

We had thought a wiki would be a great thing, but they are so primitive in their interface that they are almost completely unusable for anything other than the simplest of entries. Blogs are gaining in popularity, but they don't work well for storing documents. Many questions remain, such as how to host files and galleries of images. One thing we've discovered is that it's not enough to get a list of requirements from users. You really need to get copies of the various web server tools and play with them on real tasks before you know which ones you want.