The Mailowl Scrolls

Internal tools need evangelism too!

If we look at any Microsoft technology, there are always a couple of people out there blogging about their experiences with it and providing links to samples and references. If we want to learn Java, PHP or C++ there are a whole host of sites willing to take us from the basics, to being a master, which are built by various non-profit communities and individuals.

So why isn’t there something for the home built tools you use in your company?

I’m not talking about documentation; I’m talking about a passionate, short post about someones experience with the tool (or SDK that your company has bought at great expense) and their resolution.

I’m sure it’s been tried in the past but I would like to suggest that blogging concepts have matured (and so has its audience) and that there are people in your company who are passionate enough to write a word or two about your toolset; especially if it’s not something forced upon them and a good measure of free speech is allowed (like normal blogs in the real world). Read on Wikipedia about Enterprise 2.0

This should especially prove beneficial in large companies with multiple teams using the same toolset. It’s a convenient way to share experience across teams and can serve as a repository for new developers who need to skill up. If encouraged to the extreme like .NET blogs, you could have developers creating their own samples and tutorials which they share(just look at my blog or the blogs on http://dotnet.org.za).

Of course, intellectual property is a paramount and these “business blogs” would be for internal use only; but I do believe that if a company approached their developers who have blogs and offered the chance and ability to blog and evangelise their internal tools and SDKs, they would find developers willing to do it.

Some problems to note are consistency (i.e. regular blog posts) and accuracy (we don’t want to piss people off) and I want to ask, in line with the first problem, how active is your internal website? If it hasn’t changed in the last 2-3 months (and there are some that haven’t changed in years) you shouldn’t worry about consistency, you already don’t have it and at least this will breath some occasional life into it. As for accuracy, I think you can let the “community” handle that; as bloggers completely off the mark will be naturally shot down by their peers or, if they have a regular blog, they know how to research the correct info before they post.

I think this is an excellent experiment and if your company has internal blogs please me know about them. It’s something I want to push at my company and I think it’ll happen because it lends itself to our developer readiness program and the cost to implement is zero.