Hi everybody,
I've been thinking for a while about using twine in my workplace.
The first application I can think of is a simple "IT self-service help center" where my colleagues could find various info about our work environment (programs, printers, email sistem etc.) and how to solve some minor problems by themselves.
Twine looks to me a very good tool because it's both quite powerful and easy to use for me and really easy to use for all my colleagues due to the hyperlink navigation system and the clean layout of the "story".
Does anyone has any experience to share in this field? Both positive and negative feedbacks are more than welcome.
Thanks a lot,
Massimo
Comments
Moreover, if I choose a wiki I will have to use sharepoint's one, that I don't like very much.
I wonder, though, if my users will be able to easily navigate the help center: I don't expect them to always choose the right path (my wording could be ambiguous and/or they understanding of the technical problem poor).
With Twine you could build something that is very easy to navigate, and it's also quite easy to update in case something is missing.
I haven't tried this myself, but I think it could work.
After that your colleagues may want to be able to update/correct the content themselves, then comes the request to store related PDF / Document / Image files and before you know it you have a Content Management system like Plone or Sharepoint. *smile*
I've never actually considered using twine for a work environment but the idea got bounced to me several times over the course of the past two years. It's definitely a much smoother experience than wikis for small content volumes (eg departmental wiki or a small business). Provided you structure it set up with foresight, there really shouldn't be too many issues.
Anecdotally, having maintained small wikis in the workplace before, I've gotta say I'd have much preferred to work with Twine. We never had more than 50 (usually business critical) articles and they were always badly linked due to how annoying it was to set up a coherent structure. Net result was no one could find what they were looking for and editing was a nightmare. Some sort of "what kind of info are you looking for" followed by a list of articles would be much simpler than an over-cluttered frontpage with too much information. Also, the visual node editor would be very useful for figuring out what references what... traditional wikis are sorely lacking in this function.
Now that I think of it, the ingame codex I use in my most recent Twine project is more readable and accessible than any Wiki we ever used in the office - and that's without any search functionality at all. A simple hierarchical structure with links within the passages works really well. It was also much easier to create and maintain despite having some 150-someodd entries. So, yeah, I'd definitely say this is a viable option.
/headdesk
Right. I did not think of that.
Though... you could still use a similar technique by silently displaying (or grabbing the content directly?) passages and then regexp that? Not quite sure how you'd build such a contraption in practice (or how to rank results & relevance). Definitely not perfect or performant but it will work.
Bet there's an even better solution no one has thought of yet.
I personally think that if you want a something that allows multiple people to access / update it, that behaviours and has the features of a Wiki / Content Management system then you should think about using a Wiki / Content Management system. *smile*
But then again I've become lazy in my old age, and the thought of having to develop and maintain something in my personal time that is bound to grow in scope as more people access it seems like to much hard work. lol
So I tested my earlier concept (grabbing a bunch of passages from a list and iterating over the raw with regex). It works and is reasonably performant (read: at 50 passages iterated on, I get no noticeable hitch). Not that the results in my barebones version are sorted or sanitized or displayed in a manner that resembles anything useful. But it's definitely possible to build a search function that scours the passage content in Twine.
Edit: using twine also has an interesting gimmick for workspace applications: the computation load is shifted to the local browser rather than being run in the backend. In large user environments this could actually be quite useful for complex help guides / instructions, shifting the load away in cases where server-side operations aren't really required for the average user.