Perki

Most organizations rely on a body of proprietary information to which all employees need quick access on a daily basis. Traditionally this need was satisfied through printed documentation kept centrally across a handful of file-cabinets. Networks now allow quicker access to that information—many organizations now depend more on a secure intranet for circulating their vital information.

Perki is a document-management system that allows users to find and read the documents they need most, with special attention given to the simplicity and power of the human interface. Based on the WikiWikiWeb concept, it provides a simple, lightweight interface to a set of shared documents, allowing users to harness the power of hypertext without learning a complicated new technical language.

Perki encourages an open approach to document access, where all users have access to every document and users can be trusted to modify documents responsibly. In environments where access control is needed, the system allows each document to have a privacy level, and users can be restricted to certain levels.

Each user is asked to log in with a name and password, and that name is attached to all changes made by a user, providing accountability to guard against haphazard or malicious changes. All changes are tracked so that information is never lost; old versions can always be recovered.

Pros/Cons

Perki is not especially good for bodies of documentation that your organization doesn't own, such as online documentation for third-party products.

It's not meant for designers who want to explore the visual limits of what the web medium offers; Perki is designed to do one thing really well—that is, to make it trivially easy to create, maintain, and navigate a body of interlinked textual documents.

Perki is not meant for publishing an online magazine: it doesn't use the notion of "copy-flow," nor allow authors to schedule documents for release on a particular date, nor does it allow fine control of typography or layout; good packages, already exist for this purpose. Perki offers simple, straightforward typographical changes and layout configuration.

More Info

For more information about the Perki system, contact the author, Ezra elias Kilty, or proceed to download the latest version.