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Business
A Wiki site for your organisation
THIS WEEK NetSpeak features a tool that can be deployed to create a private Wiki web site.
Though the Web is a good communication medium that can be used to publish/disseminate information instantaneously worldwide, it does not have any built-in mechanism that facilitates proper interaction. The Web is a one-way communication medium that allows a site's visitor to read whatever is available on the Net but one is not allowed to make any additions or alterations in the site's content.
This means that if you want to use a web site for collaborative tasks, you need to modify the features of the site so that it contains tools that enable visitors make their own contributions on-line — a kind of right-now web editing. There are many situations in real life that demand a Web enriched with necessary collaboration tools.
For example, you are planning changes in your company's policy matters and want to have a discussion on the subject among the people concerned. Here you need a tool that lets the participants interact freely. To start the discussion you can create a policy draft and put it on the Intranet web server and seek suggestions from all staff members and other interested parties. If, along with content, the web page provides some tools that enable others to modify/alter/edit the content on-the-fly, the whole policy formulation exercise will become fast and transparent. Here everyone will get an opportunity to respond to each and every issue being published. Apart from this facility to express personal views, each participant will get an opportunity to know the views of other members.
Take another instance where a teacher wants to use the Web for conducting an on-line discussion on a specific subject. He can post a summary of his thoughts on a particular problem, ask the students to build on them and come out with a solution. It is obvious a discussion of this kind will be effective if the participants are allowed to read/edit/alter/correct each other's postings.
Thus it is evident that there is an acute need for a two-way web where the viewers can not only view a site's content but also change it. This requirement has led to the creation of a web technology called Wiki Web. As already discussed in an earlier issue of this column (November 4, 2002), Wiki web is a web site that can be "collaboratively edited by its users.'' The content of a Wiki can be completely altered. For this, a user does not need any technical knowledge/skill other than the ability to type in the text.
Building a user editable Wiki site is no more a specialised task. Many free tools are available for floating Wiki sites easily. Here, we will explore the features of a free software that can be used to create a Wiki web site on Windows platform.
Open Wiki
Open Wiki (http://openwiki.com/) is a Wiki software written in ASP (Application Server Pages). But to install a Wiki site using this program, you need not know anything about web-related technologies such as ASP, HTML and the like. The only pre-condition is that a web server (like Internet Information Server IIS or Microsoft Personal Web server that comes along with Windows) is installed and running on your machine.
Now, download and install the program. If a web server is already running on your machine, in a few minutes you will have your Wiki site ready and will be able to access it through the browser by entering the URL: http://localhost/openwiki. If you have installed the software on your Intranet server running Windows NT, the Wiki can be accessed by anyone, from any node on the Intranet.
Perhaps you may wonder whether the system will work properly as it allows every user to change the content.
Though it is possible for irresponsible people to do some mischief, the Wiki has mechanisms to check this. One feature to be noted in this regard is the options `Recent Changes' and `View other Revisions,' which allow you to view the pre-edited pages. That is, using these features you can monitor the editing process and, if necessary, bring back the old content.
One EXE Unix_tools
If you download files frequently from the Net, it is likely that you come across files with extension `.tar' or files with two extensions `. tar.gz'. The files with extension `.tar' implies that file is in tar format, a format originally used by the file archiving program called `tar' available on UNIX systems. A compressed tar file comes with extension `.tar.gz'. If you are a Windows user who wants to generate an archive of a few files in tar format, you need to look for a Windows version of the tar utility.
Here is a program that contains tar tool along with many other UNIX commands. The program `Unix_tools,' which can be considered as a many-in-one tool, contains Windows version of such UNIX utilities as tar, gzip, ps, cat, cp, ls and pwd. A unique feature of this free software is that unlike other Windows utilities, which generally clutter the system by doing such tasks as editing Windows registry files and storing various program dependent files on several directories during the installation phase, the Unix_tools program runs directly from the compressed package. As mentioned in the Unix_tools' site "decompression from the package occurs on-the-fly directly into memory as needed.''
When you run `Unix_tools.exe' from the command prompt (or using the Windows `Run' option), it displays a window named `One-Exe-Unix' and at this point select the option `Run Unix Shell.' After a while you will get UNIX-like `command prompt' interface window, where you can enter the various UNIX commands supported by the system. For example, if you want to create a tar archive named `netspeak.tar,' enter the command: `tar -cvf netspeak.tar *. *'. This command will create the tar file netspeak.tar, which contains all the files in your current directory. For more details, check out: http://thinstall.com/unix_tools/
J. Murali Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in
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