I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked well. Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
Jay Collier at Bates ponders the strengths of Drupal and WordPress MU. In my experience WordPress is quicker to get going with, and for most web sites it can rise to most any challenge. And it is the king of multi-site installations. Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but can better support needs such as a work flow-content approval path, or something less traditional, like a content repository system. In meeting a business need the technology is normally the least important element — what are your goals, who is the audience, what do they need, etc. — those are the important questions. Once you have those answers you go looking for a technology. My advice? Look at WordPress first — if it doesn’t do what you want, in a quick straightforward way, keep looking. But in my experience that won’t happen very often.
Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat. Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive. Teambox organizes communication around projects. Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files. The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar. And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data. And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails). Now I just need a project to test it with… Read the rest of this entry »
Some public agencies understand that their data is our data — some public, or quasi-public agencies has taken a different tack. The New York Mass Transit Authority at one point maintained that transit schedules were copyrighted — nice to see they’ve come to a more reasonable attitude. Whatever their misgivings, this will make their service, and customer relations/communication better.
I attended an Apple sponsored presentation yesterday on using the Xcode IDE to build iPhone and iTouch apps. It was a very well done presentation, and had me almost ready to rush out and buy a Macbook and iTouch to get started building cool apps — certainly easy to see why Apple App building has become such a popular past time (and big money maker for Apple).
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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