Microsoft has opened PatternShare, which is
… a wiki site that aims to increase pattern sharing, dialog, and usage by bringing together people who want to learn proven solutions to common problems from people who have solved them before. The pattern format combined with the flexibility and community ownership of the wiki make the site ideal for this kind of community.
The wiki is created around the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table, which is
… a two-dimensional table that captures and organizes business artifacts according to the decisions that produce them. Business artifacts could include plans, notes, models, scripts, code, or other items that different roles in your enterprise use to make decisions and view the enterprise architecture in different ways. The PatternShare uses the table to organize patterns.
The organizing table is en extended Zachman framework, and is described as “a highly granular map” of “the enterprise space” that is organized by viewpoints, roles, and interrogatives. Read more in Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space, or check this webcast..
Patternshare.org is based on Flexwiki.
Appearently on an old version hereof, because it has the old Firefox-bug. That’s really a pity because it creates a lot of noise.
By using the framework (“organizing table”) as a container of documents, the wiki offers its users the possibility to browse by architectural viewpoints (TableRows), by interrogatives (TableColumns), and by roles (TableRoles). The documents are tagged with simple metadata when entered to the wiki, and the table and lists are generated automatically based on these metadata tags.
Flexwiki is not the only wiki that is used in EA: Design by wiki: Enterprise Architecture on a Budget. I cannot find any links to live installations of the EA-wikis mentioned there, so it is difficult to compare with Flexwiki. From what I know about the various wikisystems, I would say that Flexwiki could learn a few tricks here and there, but that it does well in comparison. Especially if the coming version 2.0 has just half the feaures they talk about. The intelligent links doesn’t work in Firefox neither, by the way; I had to dig into the page source code to find this link.
I don’t know where things go wrong. That is, it seems to be a problems in the javascripts, but is it Firefox of Flexwiki that is to blame? Basically, that doesn’t matter – Flexwiki should support other browsers that MSIE.
