wikisym 2008: enabling wikis for the enterprise

IBM Technology & Innovation

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

Enabling wikis for the enterprise

Soobaek JangBrian D. Goodman



Choosing a right software can be confusing

Scalability

Flexibility

Customizability

Performance

Single or farm

Open Source or Commercial



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 wikisOver 400,000 pagesOver 300,000 users



Content management

Team & project management

Collaborative authoring

Employees are using wikis in different ways



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 trafficOver 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 loadMultiple instances

Geographically distributed

Clustered Over 300,000 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

300,000 employeesOver 22,000 wikis

Over 400,000 pages

Data collected on July 3, 2008

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

15 miles / hourFast sprinter

219 miles / hourFast sports car

– Changes based on in-depth analysis of IBM’s wiki traffic patterns– New deployment architecture and traffic distribution– Added hardware/P5, upgraded middleware & tuning

– Currently deployed on 6 servers with 4 more to come– Distributing medium traffic wikis to allow for growth– Continued analysis to forecast and manage future growth

210 wikis redistributed in

first week



All things staying the same, WikiCentral performs

Wiki traffic does not follow typical patternsMidsized wikis drive the most concurrent trafficBefore and after shows pattern stays the same

Before After



The number of views to specific wikis stayed constant

Views increase after noonbecause performance isno longer a barrier to usage

Unique wikis used to be highbecause the system wasunable respond fast enough



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

Average response timeis 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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