Grabbing at Straws

I promised I'd talk about the efforts to get the SDK wiki going at my company. I'll leave out the name of the company but I just can't tell the story without talking about the business it's in. My sense of irony wouldn't permit it.

You see, my employer is in the information business. Its job is to help organizations manage content-- as loaded a term as you'll find in this Internet Age. By content, I mean records, documents, audio, video, and other forms of stored knowledge. Not the stuff in people's heads -- nobody can help with that -- but just about everything else.

We make software that helps governments, companies, and other organizations, manage their information. It sounds simple, doesn't it? Actually, it's very hard. This story helps prove that point.

I work on the technical side of this firm. I was hired to help assist our customers and partners user our Software Development Kit, or SDK. It's basically a set of tools that allow folks to customize our software application.

We faced a few challenges with these tools. The main challenge was that most people didn't know these tools existed. Quite a few were uncertain as to how to use the tools. Others had trouble troubleshooting things they had constructed using the tools.

Compounding the problem was that the company is a global organization. The folks best positioned to talk about the SDK were in Australia, where our company and its R&D team is headquartered. Our other customers, particularly those in North America, had to deal with intermediaries. (That's me.)

Or they could have read the manual, the documentation, or the sample code that shipped with the product. But who does that nowadays? Nope, for most of our customers, the best option was to call or write an email to our helpdesk.

The problem was that email and phone calls don't scale well. We needed a way to capture the questions and answers, a way to refine our documentation and samples, and a way to get the word out about our tools. And we needed to do it fast. We're in a competitive industry with a lot of big players.

Wheteher due to inspiration or despiration, the API Support guys (including me) and the R&D folks turned to a tool that might help us solve the problem: a public facing wiki, driven by the Dokuwiki engine, that would allow all of our employees and partners to contribute to our knowledge base.

It sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? In the next few posts, I'll tell you how it played out.