Many studies have been done on hand dryers vs. paper towels. However, most studies are outdated in comparison to today’s hand dryer technology. Today’s technology proves that with hand dryers vs. paper towels, the hand dryers are the clear winner in every way.

Paper towels cannot be recycled, consume precious resources,
and use excessive landfill space.

20,000 gallons of water are polluted to make one ton of paper towels.
17 trees are consumed to make one ton of paper towels.

A company named American Dryer makes the following hand dryer that can help lead the way to saving the environment.

EXTREMEAIR® Hand Dryer
With its patent pending technology, the EXTREMEAIR® is 3X faster – it dries hands completely in 10-15 seconds. This is accomplished with a powerful blast of warm air that quickly breaks up the layer of surface water on a user’s hands for quick removal and evaporation.

While all American hand dryers save trees and reduce landfill
waste – The EXTREMEAIR® uses up to 80% less energy
than conventional hand dryers.

The new GXT EXTREMEAIR hand dryer has been GreenSpec® Listed. This is an unbiased list of the most environmentally friendly products published by the editors of Environmental Building News. The EXTREMEAIR met tough GreenSpec standards because it conserves energy and reduces maintenance and waste.

The EXTREMEAIR helps facilities qualify for LEED® credits. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The EXTREMEAIR helps facilities qualify for LEED-NC, LEED-EB AND LEED-CI Credits in two categories:

EA Credit 1–
Optimize Energy Performance
EA Prerequisite 2 –
Minimum Energy Performance

I wasn’t aware of the pagetree plugin that you mentioned — that’s a good one to know about. Also, thanks for noting the larger philosophical argument. I’m still pretty new to wikis.

I was aware of the SharePoint-to-Confluence connector. The lack of a comments field with SharePoint’s wiki is a serious drawback. I’ll have to try that out some time.

Will I show my SharePoint prototype? I’d like to, but it’s all backed behind a corporate firewall and is full of proprietary information. However, I will probably dummy up some screenshots and give a better tour and feel. I’m still very much in the experimental stage. I’m really bending SharePoint to make it do what I want. I readily acknowledge that Atlassian Confluence is no doubt a superior tool in this area, but like I hinted at with my spoon analogy, I’m working with what I have available.

Nice to hear from you.

Thanks for a really interesting post. I’m using a wiki for technical documentation now, but was a SharePoint power user in my previous job. I’ve never used the SharePoint wiki and blogging, so it’s really good to hear your experiences with them.

The lack of a left-hand navigation is something that comes up again and again with wiki documentation. With some wikis, you can achieve this. With Confluence, there’s the “pagetree” plugin which you can install into your wiki and works quite well. There’s a bit of a philosophical conundrum here: should wikis be structured and so support such an in-depth view of their page hierarchy, or should they be an organically-growing mass where content is accessible chiefly via search? Of course, as a tech writer, I’m all for the structure thing

The list and column properties of SharePoint are very powerful. When you finally cotton on to what they are all about, you can work magic. I did find, though, that not many end users had the time to get comfortable with this way of looking at their documents. Still, I do agree with you that this is a definite SharePoint plus.

Like you, I’m converted to working with a living, breathing pages, even though they do sometimes bite back. It would be hard to go back to packaged-and-shipped documentation.

I do hope your triangular spoon does the job for you. Is there any chance we’d be able to see (a subset of) the end result?

Another btw: did you know that there’s a SharePoint-to-Confluence connector, so that you can view Confluence wiki pages in SharePoint and SharePoint lists in Confluence? It would be great to hear your opinion of this fairly new phenomenon.

Cheers
Sarah

Sarah MAddoxs last blog post..AODC – in conclusion

I initially wanted to implement Feedback Server, but it requires Microsoft SQL Server, which isn’t a supported technology where I’m at. In other words, it wasn’t an option within infrastructure. Madcap really limited their audience by making the Feedback Server work with only one type of SQL database.

That said, I think SharePoint has some advantages. I can see the names of everyone who visits the help, because their credentials are passed behind-the-scenes through Active Directory. SharePoint (2007) also allows me to do all the same things that Feedback Server does — namely, see searches users are making, see pages they visit, provide synonyms for search strings users enter, and so forth.

But the whole SharePoint endeavor is still an experiment. Who knows — it may fail badly.

If you’ll be in Philadelphia, be sure to say hi.

I tried Sharepoint Portal Server back about five years ago so I’m not completely familiar with all the cool stuff they’ve put in lately but…

I was looking into similar solutions last year. The perfect storm of Web 2.0 and documentation that I found was with Flare’s Feedback Server / Service.

http://charlesjeter.com/2007/10/04/ <- part one of the review

http://charlesjeter.com/2007/10/14/web-20-madcap-feedback-review-part-2/ <- part two of the review.

Additionally, Mike Hamilton might have a lot more to talk about on this subject. He’s been focused on it for at least the past two years and he’s the Project Management VP over at MadCap Software. If you don’t mind, I’ll point him towards your direction – he is always good for a podcast.

Here’s the link to my podcast last year with Mike where we talked about the Web 2.0 stuff he’s into:
http://charlesjeter.com/2007/12/27/

Note: The program for the podcast lists the times and events.

John Hewitts last blog post..The Basics of Press Releases