Services

From Organic Design wiki
Revision as of 22:29, 29 April 2009 by Nad (talk | contribs) (Training: stub)

Organic Design offers a range of services around setting up wikis for your organisation and helping you use and develop the wiki for document management, collaboration and organisation. This includes the initial set-up of your wiki, administration, development and training as required. Our focus is the adaptation of the software to support additional organisational requirements such as website content management, procedures documentation and record administration. In doing so, we aim to integrate a range of functions into a unified system that can be used to organise projects and businesses in a collaborative way.

Wiki

We can set up and configure a hosted wiki to your requirements. This will allow you to take advantage of all the features of the software that powers Wikipedia, so you can create an internal or public knowledge base around topics of importance to your organisation.

Further details

Wiki skins for website

Our wiki skinning service allows you to specify what you want your wiki to look like - you can specify any "normal website" design. Then you can continue to manage your documents using the familiar wiki interface and specify which ones are to be displayed on the public website part. Just like we do on Organic Design.

Wiki organisation

We have developed a technology to add a number of functions to MediaWiki, which allow the mass creation and organisation of records. These could be web enquiry forms, contact management, task tracking, invoicing or a range of other records as required by your organisation. All with the ability to track changes, discuss individual pages and mix casual notes with structured data.

Wiki development

A lot of organisations need further functions in addition to what we set up, that's where our experienced developers come in. they can help you figure out what is needed and

Support

Content Management

Training

We've defined a MediaWiki Workshop... this is usually done onsite, but has also been used successfully using IRC or Skype.

Consultancy

Server Installation & Administration

Although our primary focus at Organic Design is wiki organisation, we need to have a solid set of procedures and practices in place for setting up and maintaining servers to run the wikis on. Over the years we've developed and refined our server administration to the point where we can quickly and reliably install a complete wiki farm from the ground up based on the Debian Linux operating system. Our server installation procedures allow for rapid deployment of servers which can include the following functionality:

  • MediaWiki farm
  • Other PHP5-based web applications
  • Email server with IMAP folders, spam filtering and web-mail access
  • IRC server for hosting your organisations own private and/or public chat channels
  • Distributed backup
  • Robot framework for notification of various events and information over IRC, email and into the wiki's recent changes

Intranet & LAN

These days many organisations are using wikis internally on their intranets for internal document management and collaboration on projects and work. The procedures we've established for setting up and maintaining external web-servers form a good basis for intranet servers, but come with some additional requirements, especially when the organisation has servers both internally and externally.

Network server

In addition to the procedure used to install and maintain a normal web-server as described in the previous section, a LAN-based server often requires some of the following additional aspects:

  • Local email server for internal mail, connecting to external server where necessary
  • Local IRC server connecting to external IRC server when available
  • Network file server

Workstations

For organisations that wish to run Linux on their worksations, we have developed a package and procedures similar to those we use to install servers except that our workstations run on Ubuntu Linux instead of Debian Linux. Our workstation package allows us to quickly set up many workstations with a set of applications and configuration we've developed and refined over the years for our own workstations. The installation of workstations can be done either using a standard Ubuntu with an Internet connection, or by booting our LiveCD.

Software migration

Why use Organic Design Services?

Cost effective

We base all our services on free, open source software developed by a worldwide community of experts. This means you only pay for customisation and support of proven and reliable software. We do not charge license fees for software, or ongoing per-user fees for software. Generally there is a setup cost and an hourly rate charged for development and support. That's it!

Remain independent

We will make sure you always have a choice regarding how your organisation uses software to get work done. This means our work complies with standards and we will always make procedures available for you if you wish to administrate the software yourself. Further, our agreements do not include minimum terms or any other kind of lock-in to try and "encourage" our clients to stay. Instead, we focus on delivering quality services and maintaining good communications with our clients.