Why is it so difficult to get users to adhere to our message about social collaboration, file sharing and not to use email? We discussed that at Let’s Connect. Here’s the second part of my summary. Also: You get my presentation about sexy wikis.
IBM Connections Tip #6: Make Your Wikis More Sexy
October 7th, 2016 | Posted by in Connections | IBM - (9 Comments)Very often, the start page of a wiki in IBM Connections tends to look like this:
This looks very dull. It’s not very inviting for the users and the need for scrolling will make it harder for the users to find what they are looking for. Yes, you can tell the users to search the wiki, but believe me, they won’t!
I’ll admit it straight away: The wiki pictured above is made by yours truly, and it was made to document how to make wikis (am I meta or what?). The feedback from the users was that while my documentation was really good, it wasn’t very inviting for them to start using it. In this day and age, people want easier access to things. They want pictures and graphics, and their cell phones have spoiled them when it comes to no need for scrolling and having big colorful buttons to push.
A few months later we introduced Skype for Business in our company. And when the time came to create a wiki on how to use Skype for Business, I decided to try and spruce up the documentation a bit more. So this is the start page for the Skype for Business wiki:
This time the feedback was much better:
- Users didn’t have to scroll
- The page looked much more inviting with graphics
- The icons and text gave a good description of what each link was about
Both the icons and the text are clickable links (I show you how to make image links in a Connections wiki further down in this posting) and we took this even a step further in our next wiki. I can’t take full credit for what I’m showing you next. It was shown to me by Erik Borse from the company Item, and I rolled with it and expanded upon it.
We created a wiki to document our internal processes. From the wiki start page (which I cannot show you), you can click on an icon for Strategy and management. This is the wiki page you arrive at if you click on that icon:
Each box is clickable, and it gives the user a quick and easy way to click on further down in the wiki structure. In addition, each box has it’s own unique color. If a user clicks on the orange box, all boxes and colors on the underlying pages will be orange. This way the user knows she is still within the same subject and page structure.
The really good part here is that there’s no need for the users to design those graphic buttons in a graphical tool You can create them in Microsoft Powerpoint.
- Start Powerpoint
- Go to the ribbon called Insert:
- Click on Shapes:
- Choose the shape you want. The mouse pointer will now become a cross hair
- Click inside the Powerpoint document, hold the left mouse button pressed and then drag the mouse pointer to the right until you the figure has reached the desired size:
- Release the mouse button
- Double click on the shape to go into editing mode. Add the text you want. If the text gets too big, you can either decrease the font size (just like you would change font size in a normal text document) or click on any of the circles surrounding the shape to resize it by pulling back or forth:
- You can change the color of the shape in the ribbon menu:
- Click on the shape and make sure it looks like this:
- Copy it (Hold down CTRL+C). If you hear an error sound from Windows, click outside the box and the inside it again to mark it. Try again
- Go to the wiki article, put it in edit mode, place the cursor in the spot where you want to paste the shape and paste it (CTRL + V):
PS! Making buttons like this from Powerpoint only works in Windows, it will not work on a Mac!
What will work on both in Windows, Linux and on a Mac, however, is pasting regular images into the wiki article. And now I’ll show you how to create a link to another wiki-article, so that when a users clicks on an image, that article will load. This method works both for regular images and images created with Powerpoint:
- Open the wiki article you want to link to
- Go to the URL-field, mark the entire text and click copy it (either by right clicking on it or CTRL + C):
- Go to the wiki article you are editing and click on the image you want to create into a link, right click on it and choose Image Properties:
- The following screen will pop up:
- Click on the tab called Link:
- The popup will now give you this form:
- Paste the wiki page address into the URL field. Use the Target pull down field to choose whether this link should be opened in a new window or not
- Click OK
That’s it. Now the image will contain a link that will open the wiki page you linked to. Save the wiki article and test that everything works fine (it should).
I’m not saying this is the perfect way to construct wikis, but in my experience it does make wikis look nice and easier to use. And it’s really easy to learn how to do it, without becoming an HTML expert. Of course, if you do know HTML, you can make some pretty impressive wiki designs, but I wanted to show you an easy trick which is more achievable for everyone.
Did you like this tip? Leave a comment either here or on the social media platform where you found it! And give me a follow!
IBM Connections Tip #5: Version Control of Wiki Articles
September 30th, 2016 | Posted by in Connections | IBM - (2 Comments)Just like you have version control of files in IBM Connections, you also have complete version control of wiki articles inside a wiki. Every time someone edits an article, and save the changes, the last version of that wiki article will be kept.
The versions of the article are listed at the bottom of the wiki article. Click on the tab Versions, to the righ of the tab Comments:
Restore previous version
You can restore a previous version of a wiki article in the following way:
- Find the version you want to restore and click on the link to the right called Restore:
- You will now get the following message:
- Click OK to restore this version. This will now be the current version, and the version you replaced will now be pushed down on the list. Connections will even tell you what version you restored the current version from:
You can now of course restore back to the previous version by clicking on the Restore link behind it in the list. Here I’ve done this:
Compare versions of wiki article
You can also compare versions to see what’s different between them. If there is more than one version of a wiki article, you will see this at the bottom, under the tab Versions:
To compare two versions against each other you choose the number of the versions in the pull down fields. In the picture above, I’ve selected to compare version five against version four. Click on Show comparison. Both articles will now shown next to each other:
The text marked green is the text that’s been added or changed in the newest version and the items coloured yellow are text that’s been deleted in the newest version.
You can also choose to compare other versions in the fields at the top:
So as you can see version control of wiki articles is a very useful tool.
Please leave your feedback below. Always appreciated. And if you have any questions regarding Connections, don’t hesitate to ask.
Last Wednesday the autumn meeting for ISBG, the Norwegian IBM user group, took place. ISBG is a standalone forum for customers and users of IBM’s software solutions for collaboration. In my employer’s case that means IBM Notes/Domino, IBM Notes Traveler (email, calender and contacts on mobile and pads), IBM Connetions and IBM Sametime (but we are moving to Skype for Business soon).
I gave two presentations. The first one was a very technical one where I explained how you can make it possible for users to log on to a web-based Domino solution without having to register those users in your Domino Adress Book. You only need to register them in Active Directory. I will do a blog posting about this, but you can download my presentation here.
In my second presentation I told how we at Brunvoll have used wikis in IBM Connections to document our processes. We are in the process of being certified with several new ISO certifications, and those demand that we document our processes. I demonstrated how we had used graphics and design to make the navigation through the contents and structure of the wikis more inviting and sexy. I also told what we liked about the wikis in IBM Connections, and the things we find are lacking in the wiki applications.
The reception was very good, and several people thanked me afterwards for teaching them that you actually have version control in the wikis, just like you do with files.
I’ve also received a lot of good feedback about Brunvoll and the fact that we share our experiences and knowledge like we do in these forums. That’s really nice to hear.
On the top of all this I was also given ISBG scholarship, worth 20 000 NOK ($2300), so that I’m able to go to the annual IBM Connect (formerly known as Lotusphere) conference in Orlando, FL, USA in January. I was very happy about this, because I had received word from my boss that there probably wasn’t money left on the budget to send me this time. A colleague of min will also be going on Saturday January 30th.
The scholarship is given out every year. The person who gets it is obligated to blog every day from the conference (which I do in this blog anyway) in addition to give a presentation at the ISBG meeting in February. And I’m not shy about talking and holding presentations, so no complaints from me there.
I will during next week blog about some of the presentations from the ISBG meeting.
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