WikiSym 2008: Enabling Wikis For The Enterprise

IBM Technology & Innovation

Enabling wikis for the enterprise

Soobaek Jang
Brian D. Goodman

WikiSym 2008 | September 8-10, Porto, Portugal © 2008 IBM Corporation


Choosing a right software can be confusing

Flexibility

Scalability
Performance

Customizability

Open Source or Commercial

Single or farm



Take the time to evaluate

Start with fewer features and
then introduce

Meet user expectations by
delivering only what you can
handle

Dynamic embedded features
can cause problems

If you don’t understand your
users don’t assume you do



Energize early-adopters, they are the core of communities

Grass-roots communication is powerful –
it places people at the center

Use multiple mediums to engage people in
an open public way

Empower people to participate in the open
to be exemplar contributors



WikiCentral was an experiment that grew too fast



WikiCentral — enables employees to share information
without process or technology know how

Support fast, simple and effective
website management
Provide self-service team
collaboration spaces
Facilitate true community-based
encyclopedic authoring

Over 22,000 wikis
Over 400,000 pages
Over 300,000 users



Employees are using wikis in different ways

Content Team & project Collaborative
management management authoring



Your community’s behavior influences your strategy

With over 1,000 new wikis created per month
An ever increasing database and file system
High volume diverse traffic
Over 300,000
employees

Viewing over 1,000
wikis per hour

Averaging over 20
views per wiki

Managing over
330 GB of data



Your community’s behavior influences your strategy

It makes sense to distribute to load
Multiple instances
Geographically distributed
Over 300,000
Clustered employees

Viewing over 1,000
wikis per hour

Averaging over 20
views per wiki

Managing over
330 GB of data



WikiCentral for over 12 months barely kept up



WikiCentral in transition – the interim smart-routing design



Things to consider when distributing wikis

Wikis need to be unique across all servers – it gives us freedom
– Wikis can be moved from server to server without issue
– Wikis can survive when we move to a high-availability cluster

Wikis servers need to route users to where their wikis are
– URLs will change, but users don’t
– Smart routing will ensure you always get where you are going

Smart routing services will be required to make these servers “one”
– Aggregated information are served from smart routing such as user
information, activities, and preferences.



Smart-routing, high-available clusters makes it easy to do
more complex deployments



Over time centrally located clusters can move closer to users

Employee’s shouldn't have to
visit Southbury, Connecticut
to get to their wiki.



Distributing the load unevenly turns out even better



In July, WikiCentral improvement paved the way for productivity

15x improvement in performance!
Slowest transaction at peek load now takes 1 second!

15 miles / hour 219 miles / hour
Fast sprinter Fast sports car

– Changes based on in-depth analysis of IBM’s wiki traffic patterns
– New deployment architecture and traffic distribution 210 wikis
– Added hardware/P5, upgraded middleware & tuning redistributed in
first week
– Currently deployed on 6 servers with 4 more to come 300,000 employees
– Distributing medium traffic wikis to allow for growth Over 22,000 wikis
– Continued analysis to forecast and manage future growth Over 400,000 pages

Data collected on July 3, 2008



All things staying the same, WikiCentral performs

Wiki traffic does not follow typical patterns
Midsized wikis drive the most concurrent traffic
Before and after shows pattern stays the same

Before After



The number of views to specific wikis stayed constant

Views increase after noon
because performance is
no longer a barrier to usage

Unique wikis used to be high
because the system was
unable respond fast enough



WikiCentral response time is under a second and will improve
as we redistribute mid-sized wikis

Average response time
is under 1 second!



Summary

Choose the right software for your wiki situation

Take time to evaluate components and features

Energize early-adopters, they are the core of communities

Support your users with care – their success is shared with you

Build your wiki solution to meet your end-user's expectation –
scalability, functionality, and speed



[sjang | bgoodman]
at
us.ibm.com


WikiSym 2008: Enabling Wikis For The Enterprise

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