Jive or MediaWiki – how to organise your team?

Here’s a quick question.

Our company recently bought wholesale into Jive SBS as our Knowledge-sharing platform.

Now, rather than relying on an ancient-runes-of-the-geek markup editing in our old Wiki sites based on MediaWiki, we can simply pile all sorts of information, discussions, etc. etc. etc. into Jive, and then just google-search the lot whenever we want to find something.

Except… I don’t like it. And I’ve launched myself headlong into this for over a month, so I should have a good idea by now.

Here’s the problem: structure – of both Knowledge, and how your mind navigates it. On our Wiki, we had a top level index of our departments. Browsing into mine, would show various high-level titles such as team organisation, demos, RFP information, etc. etc. Navigate into one of those, and you’d find a suitable submenu… and so on, and so on. At the bottom of the tree would be some details, or a table, or a load of attached files.

With Jive, there are a few top-level groupings, but everything else is unstructured. Instead of a hierarchical organisational tree, there are tags. You tag your info, and someone else searching for that info should be able to find it, just based on the tags, and keywords.

Now… I’m sorry, but that’s not the way I roll. If I want to dig out the latest demo recording for my team, then on the  Wiki, I can go to that page – maybe even bookmark it – and there’s a list of all our recordings with the latest one at the top. Click. Done.

With Jive, and similar applications, assuming that we have a lot of info there, I can’t just browse to it, because it’s not organised in that way. Instead, I search, or I filter by a number of tags. Assuming that all documents were tagged correctly… because when using Jive, tagging is optional, and unstructured, whereas with MediaWiki (at least, one that you build a structure into), then the hierarchy that you use to find the documents is both compulsory, and structured.

Let’s take an analogy. With MediaWiki, you know where to find stuff – in the same way that your keys are by the door, and your milk is in the fridge. Want to open the back door? Your deadbolt key will be in the hallway, on the shelf, on your main keyring. Your old key from when you had the locks changed may still be on the keyring too, but you remember which is which.

With Jive, you stand in the centre of your house, and shout “back door deadbolt key!” And, instantly, unseen hands strew a range of keys, maybe a paint key chart, a book on keys, and an album by Alicia Keys, on the table in front of you. Easy! Fast! And so you take the key you want. Except.. is it? Is it definitely the backdoor key? Is it the old key, or the new one? Did they find all the keys? You’re really itching to go back to the hallway anyway, and check the shelf, in case there are any other keys there. Except, of course, with Jive, you can’t.

And so that’s where I stand with Jive. It’ll give you results… and you may find stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t have done… but you’re not sure what else there might be, and so therefore, you can’t be sure that what you’ve retrieved is the best result for you.

Of course – I can see why Jive has been chosen. It’s much more user-friendly, looks cooler, has an iPhone App (which is unreliable and slow on the server side, at least on our deployment), and removes the necessity of nominating someone to, in our analogy, be the housekeeper. Rather than trying to keep things organised and tidy, with Jive, you can more or less throw everything anywhere, abeit with a few tags if possible, please, and Jive’ll sort it out. We hope.

Cabair Helicopter Tour of London

Well, I thought I’d write a quick review of this, just to get it out there on the ‘net.

A bunch of companies offer helicopter tours across London, and others act as agents for them – Red Letter Days do, for a start. We chose Cabair as their operating base at Elstree was closest for us.

Long story short: it was fine – the helicopter was modern and comfortable, and flew from NW London across Wembley, down to Westminster, then along the Thames to the Dome. And then back again.

The feedback was (it was someone else that went), that it was very quick. To be fair, Cabair were open with this on the phone, but the entire experience takeoff to landing is 20 minutes – 5 minutes to Westminster, 5 down the Thames, and 5 and 5 back again. The half-hour slot is for their benefit – to load the passengers and start the engines – not yours.

For the most expensive experience on offer, you don’t get anything “more”. No exceptional tour guide, for example. All helicopters on such trips, from *any* operator, can only fly down the Thames, and can’t loiter.

Hence I would recommend someone further out from London, as you get to enjoy the flying a bit more. I found others at Redhill, Damyns Hall and Stapleford.

Also – while Red Letter Days were offering a flight for £149, I asked them for times they had flights for this weekend, which they had to research and call me back. Then, while calling other operators, I phoned a company at Stapleford who, surprise surprise, had exactly the same slots available, evidently the company RLD use, at the price of £110. So you can save yourself £40 right there.

As I say – no great revelation, but perhaps worth sharing!

Is there an incompatibility with the current Windows Patches, Microsoft Update, and ESET NOD32?

Here’s something that’s cropped up in the past few days.

My Mum reported that her computer (MacMini Intel 512MB with Bootcamp, running XP  SP3 Home) had become really, really slow.

It was random – sometimes it was slow on bootup, sometimes it’d work fine and then an hour later, slow down as before. Incredibly slow – like 15 minutes to log in.

Some playing with Sysinternals Process Explorers shows that svchost.exe, and Windows Updater inside it, was consuming around 150MB – peaking at 350MB on occasion. NOD32 was orange in the system tray, and showed 20-30 updates missing, some critical – although Automatic updates are on. I turned off the Update service, and normal service resumed.

Watching process explorer, I saw the update process sit at around 150MB for a few minutes, then ramp up to 350MB for 2-3 mins, then drop again. I did this while running Update manually via IE7 – which never completed.

Anyway – some googling turned up similar problems experienced by other users, on various forums. Following tips there, I turned on the Update system service, went to Windows
Update via IE, and switched off Microsoft Updates under Settings. Tried the manual update again, and this time it worked – and reported ‘0 Critical Updates’.  Yet NOD32 had shown at least 5-6 critical updates just minutes earlier!

So – possibly a bug involving MS Update and NOD32? It’s recent behaviour, so maybe it was caused by a partial failure of the big patch the other (last) week. I’m no expert, and just speculating, but this IS real, and does appear to be an incompatibility/bug.