What are the benefits of Wikis in Acumatica?

What are Wikis?

Howard G. Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki called WikiWikiWeb, which was launched in 1995, named it after the Hawaiian term wiki, which means quick or swift. Repeating the word adds more weight and emphasis to the term. Today it is better known by its shorter version wiki.

Wikis are created to help organize information that is process and knowledge-based and can be managed by a particular group or department within an organization.

Benefits of Wikis

One benefit of having a Wiki is having a centralized online information resource that can be easily accessible and yet can be monitored and or shared in a secure environment.

The wikis can be created and managed through team collaboration within an organization to help raise the knowledge base and efficiency of the company.

Wikis functionality in Acumatica

The out of the box wiki, Help, in Acumatica covers online documentation that is extensive and specific process-related.

However, within any organization, there are processes that are unique to their business processes, and most times referring to the Help wiki in Acumatica does not provide the user a quick or swift direction.

Rolling out a new ERP within any organization is no easy feat for management.

On top of that dealing with anxious end users who are now faced with learning their processes in a new system can be both time-consuming and not cost-effective.

By creating a company-specific process-related help guide through a centralized wiki within Acumatica can go a long way towards making the transition to the new ERP an exciting and educational experience for all.

End-Users can collaborate on mapping out the processes, contribute, and/or help create the wiki articles related to their processes thereby owning the process.

User Defined Wikis in Acumatica

Acumatica ERP supports user created wikis.

You can create a wiki or a wiki folder and assign these to a specific workgroup within the organization or to all users. Templates can be saved and applied to new wiki articles to enable faster creation with default formatting.

Management of the centralized company wiki can be accomplished by utilizing the role and multi-level access rights functionality within the Acumatica ERP and furthermore controlling the publishing of articles through the wiki article approval workflow.

An Internal User role can be set to grant just viewing rights to end-users. Whereas a Wiki Author role can be created to grant the user(s) managing the wikis all rights to the wikis. These would include the right to create, edit, view, move and publish articles and folders.

Wiki versions can be maintained, tracked, compared, and reverted to a previous version which enables ‘rolling back’ changes if required.

Wiki Content management

Wiki types can be Article or Knowledge-Based (KB). The Article type is most used when creating Help guides.

A KB type of article is similar to a basic article but may require or encourage user feedback and ratings. This type of wiki might be created when there is a requirement to gather information from internal and/or external end-users.

Related Sub articles can be created and are referenced on the Parent Articles.

Links to areas in the current article, to other articles in the same wiki, or to external websites can be created to enable quick and swift access… the wiki in this case living up to its name… swift and quick.

Adding graphics to an article

 This can add an extra layer of accessible help and further enhance the user’s experience.

Adding a Video link to a wiki article

Creating training videos for company-specific processes and adding links to them on a wiki article is another helpful tool that the organization can utilize, and the user can easily access through the wiki help.

Dashboards can be more than just sources for data

Further ease of access to a Company-specific Wiki can be accomplished by creating a Dashboard within Acumatica and assigning the related wiki pages as widgets to it.

This again gives the user a wiki wiki (‘quick’ and ‘swift’) access to the company process or policies manuals.

Creating department-specific Dashboards with wiki pages and assigning access rights and roles helps manage visibility and access to department-sensitive data, processes, and policies.

No Excuses for Unhappy Users

Maximizing, utilizing, and supplementing the power of Acumatica Help by creating company-related manuals and policies as wikis will relate to a smooth and less stressful ERP transition through implementation and post-go-live.

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