The market is flooded with so many options, few of which all behave the same, yet do much of the same things. I think it's brought about due to technological overload and as you noted above the "culture" that a user adapts to and prefers. I don't think the gap is generational or related to one's education. Afterall, if everyone could do what my company does, why would they need me!? to create a design and now even take that design and implement it into machine controlled equipment, survey devices that have been docked by field crews, and similar, has essentially allowed my firm to seem or act like a much larger company than it actually is! As for ease of use though, I'm glad it's more difficult than say communicating on facebook. The command in CAD which was around forever was called Match or simply type ma to match properties of items in your drawing I won't complain though, I wanted just such feature in a wordproessor for a long time!)īeyond just collaborating on a file, the ability to collaborate across about any real/physical border such as an ocean, state line, etc. Basically rocking the Word type publishing World! (BTW I see Word has stolen "format painter" as they call it from AutoCAD. Then since 1 file can contain numerous "drawings" (typically built in layouts much as the sheet tabs work in excel, they created a publish command, which is a smart system that allows you to do just that, publish the drawing set whether to digital or paper media, in a much more efficient manner than say printing each. They created a product called autodesk vault, which allows multiple users to work on one particular file. What is the gap between someone who thinks the business world is a collection of MS Word documents and someone who things the world is a more directly accessible, public, and transparent collection of content? And how do we get people across that gap?Īutodesk has another way of collaborative workflow. I wonder what percentage of people in the SharePoint camp are regular contributors to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks?
There's probably a more articulate way to describe that, but what I'm getting at is that my wife is also comfortable with blogging, Facebook, and the online / social community in general. Maybe the gap is a generational/cultural one rather than an educational/cultural one.
I often hold up my wife, an English major / office worker / writer, as an example of "if she can do it, then an IS person should be able to do it!" But perhaps I'm looking at the wrong set of characteristics. Perhaps that's a strong statement, but I think that any IS person should feel comfortable picking up a little HTML or wikitext markup. or really any business support job for that matter. and if you can't write a simple SUM() or =A1+B1 is MS Excel, then you don't have any business being in an IS job.
PAYDIRT AND TERRAMODEL HOW TO
We're using a wysiwyg editor! Is a little wikitext markup really programming? I think the ability to pickup on a little wikitext is just like the ability to learn how to use formulas in MS Excel. "Our analysts aren't programmers," they say. This argument from the SharePoint side that you have to program the wiki is the one their leadership is most adamant about. On the MediaWiki side, you have an argument that "Sharepoint organization doesn't make any sense searching across different sites is awkward you always have open a separate document in a separate application to see what you really want to see and it just doesn't feel webby enough." On the Office/Sharepoint side, you have an argument that "everyone knows how to use MS Office applications cut and paste of screenshots is easy you don't have to know how to program the wiki." It'll be obvious, but just to lay it out up front, I stand firmly on the MediaWiki side of this discussion. One of the big cultural battles has been a solution of MS Office documents and MS SharePoint versus MediaWiki. What kind of documentation is required? Where should that documentation be stored? What format? Who should create it? etc. For instance, there's been a big emphasis around transition of system maintenance and support responsibility from project/implementation teams to support teams. At the office, we're working on a strategy around how we maintain and publish various types of technical information and instructions.