Tuesday, December 1, 2009
EditMe has lots of cancellations, and that's not a bad thing. Many customers use temporary wikis. They might last a month, maybe three, maybe twelve. These sites typically serve as a space on the web to store information about a project or event that has a short lifespan. When the need has passed, the site can be downloaded, archived and canceled. The cost of the wiki over one or a few months is negligible compared to the benefit produced.
So what are some common uses of temporary, or disposable wikis?
Just because a project is small and may only last a few weeks or months doesn't mean a wiki isn't a great way to maintain a central repository of information for it. It takes just a few minutes to create most hosted wikis, another few minutes for folks to register, and you're ready to go. That time will be saved the first time the wiki is used to provide a central place for team members to update project information.
Events come and go, and often the effort that went into gathering information needed to organize the event is lost after the event has passed. Using a wiki allows event planners to pull all information and resources together into a central location. Think of everything you need to pull together to plan a major event: location, decorations/signage, speakers, entertainment, catering, transportation, and more. Spend three minutes creating a page for each of these on the wiki and put all contact information and status updates on the appropriate page. This type of organization allows team members only interested in catering focus on that page and not get copied on emails about securing the location. Of course, the benefit is that the guy responsible for catering can check in on the status of the location at any time by simply checking the wiki.
Many EditMe customers use a template wiki: a wiki site they've set up just the way they like it, and use that as a starting point for each new wiki they created. Event planners find this particularly useful, as the setup and structure can be reproduced effortlessly with each event. And improvements made along the way can be added to the template site so they're not lost.
EditMe offers an export feature to allow content to be quickly and easily saved in a single HTML document. Open source tools like HTTrack can also be used to quickly make an offline copy of a web site that can be zipped up and stored for future reference if needed. Compared to email scattered across multiple inboxes, this method creates a much cleaner package of archived information about a long forgotten project or event.
