Corporate-owned (Enter Prise) network of systems accessible only to its employees (and maybe contractors). (If you add customers and/or vendors, it becomes an Extra Net.)

The main info storage mechanism used to be the [File Server]. It's becoming the Web Server more and more.

I tend to avoid central control for a large organization, as I think most of the value accrues locally (to the team, project, department), so better for each of them to find what works. But I think it's good for a central IT group to nudge people toward a particular set of technologies (the carrot approach is "we'll host it for you and you won't have to worry about maintenance and backups") - but they'd better have a decent written evaluation to show people.

Given a mix of bottoms-up solutions, what are the enterprise-wide issues or tools to keep in mind?

• authentication/access: people will want to access systems from outside the office (home, the road). So a firewall isn't a great answer. VPN-s are a hassle to set up for each user, esp for people wanting to use their personal home equipment. Should all servers be accessible by all employees in the enterprise? Either way, you may find the need to have all servers support authentication against a central LDAP server, or something like that (Digital Identity, Single Sign On)...

• a Web Spider feeding a Vertical Search Engine, to make everything accessible. Given the breadth of material, relevance ranking (vs simple keyword matching) is necessary. A GooGle appliance might do the job, though the Page Rank

  • some sort of controlled topic/vocabulary might be a good idea - e.g. every project has a canonical name which is used exactly in each posting relevant to it. Then one can use that name in searching and find things more widely...

• some way for team/department members to share bookmarks ("here's that key [HR] policy"). A general easy-authoring (WebLog, WiKi) engine may make this easy, as long as they keep it easy to post/maintain reference documents, rather than having blog entries slide off into the archives. (Note that this linking can feed a GooGle Page Rank algorithm.)

• some sort of Back Links or most-popular-pages rankings

• a Sister Sites WiKi directory

Harder, but probably necessary:

• some way to at least view some filtered To Do List from multiple spaces you are working in. An RSS feed might be sufficient, if your To Do List lets you just get a fresh full list that way, not just a list of changed tasks.

  • any given person should have very few spaces he's actively involved in this way, I think.

Weblog For Collaboration Ware, BlogWeb, AppLog

Wiki For Collaboration Ware, WikiWeb, AppWiki

User Options Recent Changes Help Page