The company I work for is looking at a variety of tools that could be used to store information that doesn’t really fall into any existing system out there. The idea is to capture knowledge that is somewhat random, yet categorizable, in a way that allows people to easily search, learn and modify.

The first tool that came to mind was a wiki. The OpenNTF.com Domino wiki, to be exact. The tool allows for free-form entry of information, attachment of files, searching and versioning. Its CSS based, so changing the UI to fit into an existing system would be relatively easy. It also is RSS enabled, so when we launch Notes 8, we could include it as an RSS feed, giving people easy access to newly created/changed documents.

Really, the tool is a near-perfect fit. With one unknown: will people ‘get’ the WikiMarkup language that’s built into it. This tool is easy to find via the “Style Tips” button at the top of the page and allows you to use some common symbols to change your text appearance. Example (from editing/creating a new document):

As you can see, pound signs, asterisks, pipes, etc. all serve a purpose in the markup language. The concept is really pretty straight forward, but people who are used to a “B” button in MS Word might not get this type of “coding” to get your text to do stuff. There are a few “sandbox” type pages with examples that helps and once you save the document, the result is pretty clear and looks nice:

So that’s the big question: will people “get” the markup language or will all of the documents just look like a bunch of raw text. In all honesty, the answer to the question will be a big factor on the usability and adoption of the tool.

So now we’ll throw it in front of a few users and see what happens.