April 10th, 2006
Domino-based Wikis and BulletinBoards
Since Domino was first introduced over
a decade ago, it has helped enable people to easily and securely share
information. Thinking "outside of the inbox" customers
created content in discussion databases, document libraries, and TeamRooms.
This freed up the information from the constraints of individual
inboxes, and made it easier to share information not only with those inside
your company, but with your customers, partners, suppliers, and other external
communities. In the last few years we've witnessed collaboration
expand with the adoption of blogs, wikis, and other "social networking"
tools. Did you know that as a Domino customer, you already have everything
you need to adopt these new forms of information sharing?
While many people (but still not enough!)
are aware of Domino-based blogging templates such as DominoBlog
(just acquired by Lotus!) and BlogSphere,
I'd like to help promote two other Domino based applications: DomBulletin
and Domino
Wiki. Both applications
are available free (open-sourced) on OpenNTF.
The primary authors of these two templates, Ben
Poole for Domino Wiki, and
Michael
Bourak for domBulletin, have
done some astounding work.
domBulletin is a web discussion template
mixing standard Domino discussion capabilities with features found in web
bulletin boards. What I like the most about bulletin boards compared
to standard discussion databases is that you can read all the responses
to a thread on a single page, you don't have to move from document to document.
Domino Wiki is a Domino-based wiki implementation.
With blogs, users just append comments as responses to the original
document. With a Wiki all users become editors of the document,
forming a powerful collaborative pool of expertise.
I thought we, the Domino community,
should keep a repository of sites designed with these two templates so
that future customers can view the references. I've set up wiki pages
here: domBulletin
sites and here Domino
Wiki sites. Please
surf over to those two pages and add any reference you know of.
I hope you and your company take advantage
of these excellent Domino based tools.
