Community Server in Product Development
Running agile development teams is great but one of the things that can happen with agile is that information gets into a few peoples heads and often stays there until needed. If those people leave or too much time elapses before it's recalled then the information is often lost. Similarly other people new to the team have to try and extract information somehow from the existing staff and that can take time, and people in one team often miss out on the lessons learned in another.
So to try and help the teams communicate better I installed MoinMoin wiki and Community Server.
After having both of these platforms up and running for a short while now it's really interesting to see what's happening.
The blogging in Community Server has been a big hit with regular posts being made each day. Interestingly enough it's mainly the developers who have been blogging. The BA's and most testers have been really quiet.
The developers are blogging about coding practices, interesting things they find on the web and really sharing a lot of information. It's very cool seeing the team looking out for each other and trying to share as much of their knowledge as they can.
The wiki has also been used a bit, but for more of the semi-static information. Things that are popping up there are how-to's, basic guides to various processes, social stuff (like party photos), and other bits and pieces.
The forums provided by community server are still pretty much unused, but that may just be because people aren't yet sure how to make use of them properly for internal communications.
P.S. To help encourage adoption one of the things I've tried to make sure of is that I am leading the way and be an example. I'm blogging about everything I can think of, ideas I have, what's happening in the rest of the business, etc. and I'm also adding content into the wiki and trying to post questions to the forums. I'm even putting notices there and then mass-emailing people that they should look on the blog to try and get the late-adopters into it.