Tricia Usage Scenario
This usage scenario should hep clarify the business benefits for small and medium-sized enterprises and illustate the typical steps necessary to successfully establish web collaboration and knowledge management processes in an organization. Associated "live" sample data on this server illustrate how to use Tricia.
You are Demo Ltd., a small business consulting firm with a core team of three founders, additional permanent staff members, and a network of experienced consultants. Over time you have created a lot of Office documents and PDF documents. Some of them are stored on a central file server, some are sensitive and are kept on personal laptops and PCs. In addition, you have a web site describing your company, your staff, your reference customers and service offerings. Occasionally, you send out a newsletter to (potential) customers and network partners.
Everybody is spending a lot of time searching for documents, keeping private copies of important documents up-to-date, and communicating with external consultants and customers via e-mail. Your web site is always out-of-date, because it is managed by an external web design team and it is very tedious to publish information.
You intend to improve your internal knowledge management and to support your sales team and project teams by secure web-based collaboration services using Tricia.
1. Identify groups and assign roles
In a first step, you create the following initial Tricia users and groups to describe the roles in your organization:
For each group you decide who wis responsible to manage this group (e.g., Demo Administrators or Demo Staff). You may add, update or delete groups later to reflect changes in your organization:
- For a newly acquired project you create a project group that identifies the team members.
- For important events (e.g. a marketing event) you create a group of participants that should be informed about updates and obtain access to event-specific information.
2. Organize content by topics, managers and users
The key to successful knowledge and information management is
- to have exactly one reference location for each piece of shared information in the enterprise,
- to have a precisely specified set of people who are responsible to manage this information, and
- to keep track who is authorized to view and use this information.
Tricia encourages this style of collaborative information management by
- rich content structuring capabilities (sections, tables, images, hyperlinks, ...)
- stable perma-links to any content item
- flexible access-policies at the level of content collections (directories, wikis, blogs, groups) or individual content items (files, wiki pages, blog entries, person profiles)
- multiple access channels to each content item (web browser, shared file system, e-mail, RSS feed, web API).
This should be seen in contrast to the usual practice to work with multiple copies (on the shared file server, on the local desktop, in the e-mail box, or on the company home page).
After a careful analysis of your current work practice and your existing content (files, web pages, printouts, manual notes) you identify the following content to be managed by Tricia:
- Shared knowledge (managed by Demo Staff, visible to Demo Staff)
- Knowledge about companies (customers, prospects, partners, competitors, ...), organized by company
- annual reports
- finance details
- contact information and contact history
- products & services
- organization charts
- key accounts responsible fot this company
- Knowledge about general management methods, best practices and tools, organized by topic
- Knowledge about standard consulting services offered by Demo Ltd., organized by service
- marketing information: presentations, flyers
- pricing information
- re-usable content organized by process phase (offerings, analysis, workshops, presntations)
- documents, check-lists, questionnaires, diagrams,
- experts for these services
- Yellow Pages: Knowledge about members of Demo staff, organized by person
- public profile
- contact information
- past projects and project roles
- focus of interest
- Confidential management information (maintained and visible to Demo Management)
- financial data
- HR information
- One workspace per active and completed project
- Project plan: tasks, milestones and task status, project members
- Meeting notes
- Internal project documentation
- Demo Ltd. public web site (managed by Demo Staff, visible to Everybody)
- Company profile
- Management team
- Service offerings
- Reference projects
- Legal information
- Demo Events: a list of pf past and planned events relevant to Demo Ltd. (seminar and training events, trade fair participations, talks, ...)
- Demo News: press releases, announcements, survey results, newsletter
- Personal profiles of all staff members
- Image, CV, competence areas
3. Select content types
Once you have identified roles, content and the access policies between roles and content you are ready to assign content types and content spaces to your content as follows:
Use weblog entries if you want to manage "atomic" content that is naturally organized chronologically , and if there is a focus on the most recent content. Examples:
- Demo Event Announcements
- Demo Press Releases & News
- Protocols or Notes of Meetings, Conferences, Workshops, ...
Use files and directories to manage rich content that is produced and consumed by desktop applications (Word, Visio, Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project, PDF-Scanner, PDF-Reader, Photoshop, ...). Examples:
- Images, logos, diagrams, photos
- Spreadsheets with complex calculations
- Presentations, videos, audios and animations
- Scanned documents (with or without OCR enabled)
Use wiki pages in wiki spaces for all other content. In particular, consider to incrementally replace existing small Word or Excel documents by wiki pages, using embedded tables where necessary. Try to avoid large wiki pages and break up large documents into several meaningful wiki pages. Wiki pages are easier to maintain, they support revision tracking and they separate layout from content. Examples:
- Knowledge pages
- Project status documents
- Yellow pages
- Topic definitions and navigation pages
- Web pages
Each wiki page may contain arbitrary many images and links to files, weblog entries etc.
4. Define content spaces
Based on the information collected in step (2) and (3) you are now ready to define the content spaces for Demo Ltd. following the following guiding rules:
- Content of the same type and managed by the same group of people is stored in a common content space.
As a consequence of these considerations, you identify the following content spaces:
- Demo Enterprise Knowlege Portal is a wiki managed by Demo Staff, visible to Demo Staff
- A knowledge directory associated with Demo Enterprise Knowlege Portal to organize file attachments with synchronized access rights.
- A Demo Management Wiki managed by Demo Management, visible to Demo Management only
- A Management directory associated with the Demo Management Wiki to organize file attachments with synchronized access rights.
- A workspace wiki for each active and completed project
- A Web wiki rmanaged by Demo Staff, visible to Everybody
- An Events weblog managed by Demo Staff, visible to Everybody
- A News weblog managed by Demo Staff, visible to Everybody
- A personal weblog for each staff member managed by this person, vissible to Demo Staff
5. Add navigational structures as needed
Once you have populated your content spaces, users can
- search for content by full-text
- search for content based on attributes (content type, content space, modification time, ##writer, ##reader, fcreation time
- browse content items hierarchically (wikis, blog pages, directories) or chronologically (blog items)
- follow embedded hyperlinks to navigate freely between blogs, wikis, directories, personal profiles etc.
- follow reverse links ("what links here") automatically generated by Tricia.
Tags are a powerful feature to provide multiple access paths to a content item.
Tags might be used to express:
- Topics (sales, management, strategy, )
- Projects (sales
- Events (cebit2008, salesmeting)
- Responsibilities (peter, paul, susan)
- Status (todo, assigned, open)
- Priority (low, medium, high)
- Time (2008, 2-2008, Q4-2008)
You can use one or multiple tags in searches and combine these searches with Tricias search capabilities.
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