An interesting solution has surfaced lately with respect to how wiki’s are being used; and that is using the Wiki as File Sharing Software.  This is not a common use for a Wiki … or is it?

Many of our clients are realizing that it’s very easy to simply upload a file to a Wiki Topic and share it with others.  This type of solution is much easier and much faster than some of the traditional File Sharing Software out on the market today.  It is certainly better than e-mailing the files, especially if they are very large.

CoActLive has a very easy upload manager solution that makes this process more streamlined.  We don’t use any special downloads or plugins to the browser to achieve this; rather we use all native flash technology to stream the files up to the server securely and with astonishing speed.

As a file sharing solution, CoActLive is proving to be a viable package for businesses that have large files or files they frequently need to share.

Additional Benefits

Many of our clients are saying that once the file is uploaded to a topic and they share it with a colleague, they naturally begin to collaborate about the file on that very same topic page - i.e. they use the Wiki ‘as a Wiki’.  This is a very interesting phenomenon; The power and usefulness of the Wiki is surfacing as a result of another activity.

The CoActLive WebDrive Micro App is ideal for this purpose.  It enables our clients to create a virtual library of files organized with the familiar ‘file manager type’ look and feel.

Undoubtedly, this is the reason for such a broad adoption of this solution among our clients.  We look forward to more creative uses for a CoActLive Wiki.

If you have a similar need, take a look at our Free Wiki Plan as a File Sharing Software Solution.

One doesn’t usually think of Wiki’s when thinking of the United Nations but in a recent article in Newsweek (read the article) it was reported that, the United Nations "…has embraced a once fringe social technology—the wiki—in hopes that it will help staff in 80 countries share information and reach consensus with less deliberation and more speed."

The article further explains,

Wiki software—easy-to-use programs that let anyone with Internet access create, remove and edit content on a Web page—first gained popularity thanks to Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia that has come to be hailed as one of the Web’s greatest resources. Now the technology is increasingly spreading outside the world of tech geeks and into the mainstream, being adopted by workplaces, corporations and even governments.

This is great news for Enterprise Wiki’s such as CoActLive where the emphasis is on ease-of-use and focused business-grade services.  With companies in the mainstream beginning to embrace this technology with solutions similar to the United Nations effort, CoActLive is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this growth trend in a worldwide industry.

In what has been identified as the wiki workplace " … a growing number of organizations have begun shifting from traditional hierarchical structures to self-organized and collaborative networks, using wiki software—a basket of technologies that include wikis, blogs and other tools—to foster innovation across organizational and geographic boundaries." 

The article further states, "Executives say the new tools make it easier for teams to collaborate and share information, and to get projects up and running on the fly. ‘Collaborative software has become a very important part of how businesses will invent and innovate,’ says Ken Bisconti, IBM’s vice president of messaging and collaboration software."

There is no doubt, we are headed toward a wiki-enabled workplace!

Wiki’s are becoming popular topics for blogs and news articles these days but most people still see them as personal tools to interact or post photos and recipes online. Although this is very true, it is by far the whole picture. Even the mainstream media is picking up the concept of Wiki’s in the workplace and starting to write articles about it. For a relatively small minority of people, wiki’s are a hugely powerful tool for storing, organizing and collaborating at an Enterprise level.

As a wiki service provider, we have completely embraces this concept in our business where we store “EVERYTHING” in the wiki. We store our leads, customer information, projects, tasks, bug fixes, quality control, marketing and even our investor relations. This approach has served us well, increasing our productivity and decreasing our time to market for all our services and projects. The ability to store data in a structured way (Structured Data vs. Free Form Data) has expanded the usefulness of an already powerful tool; the Wiki.

This has made such an impact within our own company, we barely use any other software to manage our data. We have even created a Micro App to manage small ad-hoc discussions among our employees, almost eliminating the use of e-mail for internal communication. Although this is probably a bit extreme for most companies, we feel that there is always a better way to do things.

We call this new Micro App “WikiMail” (there is probably a better name for it) so please look for it in our next release of CoActLive.

Our philosophy is simple: if you are a light user of technology you shouldn’t have to pay as if you were a heavy user. This is the basic reason why we now offer a free version of our Business-Grade Enterprise Wiki service. That’s right, this is not a trial or a slimmed down version of the real one; it is a full-featured Enterprise Wiki for a business to use.

Wiki’s are great collaboration tools; there is no doubt of that, but mainstream small businesses have yet to take advantage of this great power. Perhaps it’s uncertainty of what a wiki is, or the cautious acceptance of the ASP data hosting scenario that this technology has not truly penetrated the mainstream small business world. Whatever the reason, CoActLive was built to focus on just that: make a wiki easy enough and secure for the average small business to embrace. Make a wiki cost effective so that the Return on Investment (ROI) is easy to justify. Really answer the questions: Why do I need one? Will this make me any more money? How will it save me money? Will it be easy to use and will it be secure for my data?

CoActLive was released with 13 Micro Apps to help a small business manage their data. Bulletin Boards, Calendars, Expense Reports, Leads Manager, Projects, Timesheets, Tournaments, Document Manager, Help Desk, Photo Gallery, Group Directory, Knowledgebase and Workorders. These light-weight applications, or situational applications, are made to be very easy to use, simple to modify by the business owner and flexible. We like to call them “Do it Yourself Software” because they are super easy to change to fit EXACTLY the business needs.