ICwiki, Microchip's social networking experiment

The other day Microchip, a major provider of microcontrollers and analog semiconductors, launched ICwiki, a web-site it hopes will enable engineers to share best known practices as well as collaborate on projects. The site is currently available in several languages, allows for public and private discussions, and as the name implies it is based on Wiki technology. As stated in the press release, Microchip sees ICwiki as an extension to the University of Microchip, and at the same time as a foray into the world of social networking, hoping to capitalize on the recent social networking trend. In its current from though, ICwiki leaves much to be desired. The first missteps can be found in the registration process, where one has to complete more than fifteen fields to finally register. Compare that to Wikipedia which requires about five. It is understandable that Microchip would like to know who ICwiki users are, but that information should be collected on a profile page or something along these lines. Another major problem with the current implementation is that search function seems to be non-functional. The current system of browsing by topic and category, date or keyword will work, but will not scale at all once the number of entries increases. The content editor is minimal in functionality at best and the layout and overall look of the site needs improvement regarding ease of use and readability. Not to mention that on several occasions the site returned errors upon which it conveniently decided to go ahead to close the browser window – very annoying. The whole social networking aspect seems also to be missing, since other than sending email to other users there is not really a way of building a network. Other than the implementation problems, one has to ask the questions whether engineers will be willing to share best know practices in a public setting. Given how strict most companies are on disclosing any intellectual property outside of the company network, it is hard to believe that many professionals are going to feel comfortable discussing in-depth technical matters or best known methods. The exact purpose of having private discussions is also questionable, since people working on projects are likely to already have an internal system that they utilize for project tracking and discussion. Thus it seems that most likely ICwiki is going evolve into more of a discussion forum for specific questions regarding problems directly related to Microchip products, than anything else, at least in its current implementation. Regardless of the final outcome, Microchip should have waited with the announcement and done some more testing or at least a beta phase, since at the moment ICwiki does not seem production ready.