The New SCN Wiki- It’s Never Been Easier to Collaborate
Today’s a day for celebration: as announced in Wind of Change: Upgraded SCN Wiki Platform & Features, the SCN wiki upgrade is now complete.
The upgrade features multiple improvements. Key features include: friendlier user interface, better performance, new macro insertion mechanism (no need for manual coding), new macros/plug-ins (described in detail below), accessible personalized user information and a central area of drop down menus which link to all available features (see image):
(For further details-click here)
I admit that when I was first introduced to the SCN wiki by Gali and Craig, it took me couple of days to grasp what they were talking about :). Seeing the massive amount of content collaboratively created by people worldwide was an enlightening yet overwhelming experience at the same time. What really excited me about the wiki was how it became a catalyst for the community to express themselves creatively in their own unique and special way. This was reinforced later as I met and interacted with more and more people from the community.
What I like the most in the new wiki is that you don’t have to know any code in order to use all the great features that wiki has to offer. They are all just a click away. Start by clicking and submit content using the wiki stage. Following your content submission it will be shifted to the designated wiki space. If you wish to engage in a deeper level in your area of expertise, feel free to reach out to me.
The new macros/plug-ins:
Child pages of a page and its descendents (children’s’ children) are being displayed in a chosen location in the page.
A dynamic & hierarchical display of a list of pages starting from a specified parent page. You can embed the macro within your page, where it can be use as a table of contents or a list of related topics.
This feature enables you to be notified on a change done in a parent page and on modification being performed in its descendents pages as well ( you will be notified when a page is created under the parent page as well).
A special navigation map which is defined by a specified label.
A chart based on tabular data is displayed. When inserting the macro, you will supply the data and choose the format of the chart.
Before trying out all the new macros and features, I strongly recommend that you visit our fresh SCN wiki user guide.
Like every process in the wiki being collaborative and creative, so was the birth of the new and improved wiki. All along the development process the wiki received love and care from members of the community and my colleagues at SCN team (Marilyn, Martin, Laure, Gali and Maya) under the guidance of Chip Rodgers.
Please share with us your thoughts and feeling about the new wiki.
This will allow even more people to share their knowledge.
Lof information was added in blogs which should be part of wiki.. and the main reason was interface (At least I faced this issue)
Interface with blog is too simple to use but old wiki interface was really hard to use and time consuming.
I am really happy with this new makeover of SCN wiki and already tried the new scn wiki and added a page. It is really to simple now.
So let's hope to see more and more contributors prefering WIKI over blogs 🙂
A couple of ideas though
The pagetree macro should not show the children only but the root page as the only root node as well.
Imagine you have an hierarchy like
+-My book
+---Feature1
+-----Detail1 to Feature1
+-----Detail2 to Feature1
+---Feature2
so I am using in the Feature1 page and all its children the pagetree root=Feature1 as a navigational help. So it is showing the Detail1 and Detail2 only which is okay for the root page, but from the child pages you want to get back to the root page as well. It would not be needed if Feature1 is just a heading with no content but that's not the model. The Feature1 page contains the overview information.
Checkout any of the pages and their children and parent pages, e.g. for
http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Scheduling
Other things I would be very keen on:
* View-counter: A way to check how often a page was viewed. Google Analytics is not good for that. There is no much value in saying the Table-of-Content was viewed often, all the child pages less. Question is, what pages or group of pages have been viewed frequently.
* Attachment should allow for more than just graphics: Examples include XCelsius dashboards, code snipplets. Probably Videos even. The CSS is good for white papers but not for an addendum to one page.
All these ideas & suggestions look really good. I've added to my action items to review them thoroughly. Please note that wiki moderators now have the ability to upload files other then images.
If you don't mind, I'll be happy to reach out to you directly, in order to hear more about your ideas!
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.