[NTLUG:Discuss] Wikis Can Replace Email and Provide Emergency Communications Systems

[Robert Pearson]

SOAs for Emergencies---
<<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibbs133054>>

[Articlequote]
So far, wikis have been used more outside the corporate firewall than
behind it (for Wikipedia and the FluWiki, for example). However, in a
more recent Network World column, the magazine's Mark Gibbs focused on
how one wiki vendor, Socialtext, is having a dramatic effect within
corporations such as the Dresdener Kleinwort Wasserstein investment
banker and Nokia, particularly for dramatically reducing e-mail use.
According to Gibbs, Socialtext will perform a gazillion functions and
pick up your dry cleaning:

"Socialtext provides the infrastructure for not only collaboration but
also for blogging, integrates with e-mail and instant messaging
services, provides search facilities with tagging, and includes basic
content management functions. It can be customized, provides access
and basic content workflow management, and uses SSL along with a
comprehensive user rights management system that can be integrated
with corporate Active Directory and LDAP systems."
[Endquote]


I just got a note from David Stephenson of Stephenson Strategies
alerting me to his blog entry which points to an issue of my
Network World Web Applications Newsletter titled Enterprise
customers make good use of wikis to combat e-mail overload
(whew).

<<http://stephensonstrategies.com/2006/05/02.html#a816>>

David's piece discusses how to build an emergency
communications system and the reference to the Web Applications
Newsletter is due to the discussion of an SOA called SocialText
that several enterprises have used to mitigate the flow of
e-mail.

The whole topic of systems to support emergency operations is
crucial in IT but of course it is one thing to be thinking in
terms of your company's headquarters getting flooded and quite
another to be dealing with the consequences of a hurricane
hitting a city, county, or state as it happens ...