Burned by a Bad Choice

Sometimes "free" is hardly that, and TCO calculations don't begin to account for the "cost" of a failed initiative. Below is an anonymized e-mail sent from a manager in one division of a very large global enterprise to another manager in a separate division which is now evaluating Enterprise Wiki software.

The sender was involved in a process of selecting wiki software for his own division. The group chose a "free" open source alternative, and it ended up "costing" the expensive hours spent reviewing options, and, more crtically, the collaboration initiative as a whole.

Hello All,

As already mentioined in my previous email, I can highly recommend TeamPage over all other Wikis I have looked at so far (personally, privately, and for COMPANY).

A "good" wiki of course alsways depends on the use case at hand, especially for enterprise-wide rollouts things such as bandwidth, security, firewalls, caching, and peering has to be considered. In general I liked TeamPage beyond the software stability for its easy-to-use features even for non-technical non-geek personell and the professional support. While many solutions have "a million developers at hand", having the two right ones with an enforceable service level was key for me in the past.

There are lots of other really cool things about Teampage that made the solution desirable for tracking, management, reporting, and dashboards (and again the responsiveness of Jordan and his team and the superior support) But again, it does depend on the use case, and fortunately Traction Software has some really good business analysts on board that will take a look at your goals and steer you gently away from all evil goodies (niceties vs. necessities vs. this-will-kill-your-wiki-usability features)

At COMPANY, we've made the mistake to go - against my recommendation - for a "cheap" open-source self-install solution (WIKI PRODUCT NAME), "maintainable by an intern with programming experience" (D'oh!).

It died approximately a week after it was started due to troubles with maintenance, setup, management, UI, and stability, and an intern on vacation. The "great freeware open-source plugin for Mozilla and IE" killed my PowerPoint and ThinkCell installation because it installed a vbscript.dll. Nice job.

Now, with a real company, you have a contract, you paid money, you have a SLA. Sue them or mangle them. You can mangle an intern in our Russia office, they will disappear over night in China, but that's not really an option in the US and Europe ;)

This is one of many communications I've had with customers and prospects who mistook free for low cost and low hassle. In another case, one of the biggest companies in the world had to hire a crew of developers to try to make a certain wiki product work within the context of their very large active directory system and security policy. More on that situation and the importance of good software in Putting the Enterprise in Wiki Blog and Social Software.