I recently read an article entitled “Document Management vs. Knowledge Management“ by John Rotenstein, a Senior Business Analyst at Atlassian in which he points out that a wiki is about changing the mindset - he writes, “don’t think document management, think knowledge management. Document management can only point you towards documents, like a traditional search engine. In contrast, when you’ve got information on a wiki you can search for information, link to it, reference it, update it, secure it, blog about it and share it.”

This is an important point and sometimes a significant shift in corporate thinking. We have become so accustomed to creating Word documents and storing them on file servers that it’s difficult at times to “switch” our thinking toward knowledge management in a wiki.

I think the last part of the quote should be the “take-away” from this article. “…on a wiki you can search for information, link to it, reference it, update it, secure it, blog about it and share it.” This is the essence of knowledge management. The information turns into knowledge because it’s easy for people to find it, contribute to it, cross link it, etc. The information becomes a part of the day-to-day culture and it grows with the company. The wiki becomes a living intranet.

A word document, in contrast, gets written, stored on the file server and sits there until someone can find it again. It’s not easy to find because you can’t get to the information inside the document with a search. Once it’s found, it must be downloaded, opened and used. If there is a change made, and re-saved on the file server, there is always a chance that someone else is also changing it and may over-right the changes just made.

John further talks about the value of a centrally located knowledge repository. His company has been around for 5 years and thankfully they have used a wiki to store their information from the beginning. This is especially important for them because they have a mixed OS office environment (PC, Mac, Linux). Because a wiki is an online system it runs on any operating system.

We see these benefits in our customers every day. The CoActLive Enterprise Wiki is the perfect solution for a company with a need to manage knowledge rather than documents.

See our solutions section for more on how to use a wiki in your organization.

See why CoActLive is the most business specific wiki in the world with real business integrations.

Implementing a wiki within your organization can have great benefits for many areas of your business but it could be challenging to foster adoption. For this reason we have put together a short list of tips to act as a roadmap to help you get started.

1. Start small
A wiki can provide great benefits and infinitely increase efficiency within a department, especially with such a powerful application platform as we have in CoActLive. But it is easy to get overwhelmed with the magnitude of such a project and easy to get sidetracked. We recommend you choose a small function within your organization and identify a specific way the wiki can be used to add value. Then begin implementing with a small group of early adopters who will be tasked with adding relevant content in the wiki. Start with the group that needs it the most. If you can identify a group that has an immediate need for the wiki, the adoption process will happen very quickly.

2. Adoption follows content
There is nothing worse than logging into a wiki for the first time and finding a blank page staring back at you… We have found that an overwhelming percentage of users who login for the first time and see no content relevant to their work, will not log in again for quite a long period - unless off course prompted to do so. For this reason, it is paramount that your small group of early adopters adds sufficient content in the wiki to make it useful for the rest of the organization.

3. Add structure
In our deployments of CoActLive we have found that a wiki environment is ideally complemented with some structure which helps to guide users toward achieving efficiency. For example, our customers always use the wiki in conjunction with one of our Micro Applications to augment the information. We have a Telecom customer who uses our wiki platform to track their leads from initial contact through the deal closing and product deliver.

The structured part of our platform allows us to create form-based input screens that users can ‘fill out’ with relevant data to create structured wiki pages. Once a page is made in this fashion, users can then add content freely with our advanced wiki features. This really helps in organizing information much more quickly than a typical unstructured wiki would allow.

4. Make the wiki important
It’s always a good idea to add information in the wiki which is not found elsewhere in the organization. This will prompt people to login and get the information. It doesn’t always have to be about work either… we found that a simple page with photos from the last company Christmas party posted in the wiki will attract more people than next quarter’s projections report. Although the projections report may be more important than Jim’s Christmas tie, we are trying to create a habit here so that when important information is added to the wiki, people already know how to access it.

One of our customers has created a very innovative feature in their wiki - they created an audio FAQ area where the frequently asked questions are answered by the real estate broker in their own voice. The obvious next step for this will be to record small bits of video to help answer some of the most popular questions. Our wiki platform is very friendly to publishing rich media content in this way and the information reaches a larger audience because it’s more interesting.

5. Keep it open
It is very important to keep the wiki as open as possible, allowing people to freely contribute. One of the primary objectives of a wiki implementation should be to build, what is known as ‘Group Memory’. Group Memory is the sum of the expertise of all the people in a group or organization. In today’s business world, it’s amazing how much ‘know-how’ is trapped in the employees inbox where it can’t help the group. A wiki can unlock this information by providing a secure environment where everyone can access and benefit from it.

But again, remember to start small - use the wiki to begin collaborating on small things such as meeting agendas. Start by posting a first draft agenda and send the link to the attendees. Ask them to review the agenda and add to it if they see fit. Then have the meeting and provide the meeting minutes on that same page. Then send the link out again and let people add their own notes from the meeting. Before long, you’ll have a completely documented meeting with very little effort from any one person.

6. Keep it simple
We like to encourage our customers not only to start small, but keep things as simple as possible. The wiki should be simple to use and contributions easy to make. The Visual Editor we use in our wiki platform is very similar to Microsoft Word so the learning process for most people is quick. We encourage our customers to keep the pages fluid and not create an overly cumbersome hierarchy. Our powerful search engine that’s built into CoActLive will generate threaded results from any search - this means that any related page will come up on the search results.

7. Find a wiki champion
A wiki champion is the person that creates awareness of the wiki and reminds everyone how easy it is to use. The wiki champion is also the person that knows the most about the wiki and can be the ‘go-to’ person for non-technical questions, such as “where should this information go?” or “Can I change the information on this page?” The wiki champion can point people to the training videos if their questions are about how to use the wiki.

8. Integrate your wiki with your in-house systems
We find it easier to put all your online systems together for people to use in one place. The CoActLive wiki can easily become the central place where your staff can access all the online tools they use every day in doing their work. If you have a Content Management System or a Sales Force Automation tool, simply add the links on your wikis dashboard. This will make it easier for people to do their work and provide another reason to login to the wiki at the same time. Further integration and even branding can be achieved by modifying three style sheet files. If you don’t have a person in house that can do this, we provide a cost effective service for changing the look and feel of your wiki to perfectly match your other online systems.

9. Make it your own - encourage personalization
The CoActLive wiki automatically generates a profile page for each user. These profile pages are a great opportunity to experiment with features and gain familiarity with the wiki. Encourage your users to personalize their profile page by adding their photo and contact information. They can also configure their RSS feeds and notifications as well as add their personalized content.

10. Security and Permissions
We often recommend to map out the security of a wiki by identifying the various groups within an organization that will be logging in. Establishing this up front is critical because a security change after content is added and users become accustomed to logging in could hinder the adoption process. We work with out clients on this point specifically to establish the right balance of openness and security for their implementation.

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.

The innovation of email was one of those pivotal moments in technology history that changed everything.  The same, I believe, is happening today with social media technologies, possibly to a larger degree.  The integration of email in any good business collaboration platform is important for a very good reason; today’s businesses use email every day.  So, for people to embrace a new technology, it has to work with email. 

Features like publishing content to a page by writing an email are critical in the adoption phase.  Uploading files by simply attaching them to an email is another critical feature.   Emailing pages out to other people and notification by email are also important. 

The other technology that businesses use, surprisingly, is fax.  Maybe some day we can look back and say, “remember those days when we used fax things…” but today it is a technology that still endures in everyday business and so it should be integrated.  One feature we’ve developed is the ability to fax a document or send a voice mail to CoActLive.  The files get converted to PDF and MP3 respectively and go into a queue where a user can then store them in the appropriate application or page.  For contracts, this works very well.  A real estate broker or lawyer can quite easily manage such documents and organize them by client by simply creating client pages and attaching files to them.

These features are all very important to help smooth the adoption of new technologies in the enterprise and help people embrace them as well as they have embraced email.

The businesses of today are the innovators of tomorrow when it comes to software usability.  If you ask a typical business owner (and we have) about software, they will tell you that they don’t care too much about the thousands of features it has.  What they care about is that it does the job they need it for and its cost effective.  This sounds really simple…and obvious.  What business owner would want to spend money on software that doesn’t do the job they need it to?   Well, surprisingly, a lot of business owners!

Then we asked the question “Why would you purchase software that doesn’t perform the job you need it to?”, we had a disturbing revelation.  “Because I couldn’t find anything better.” they said.

Now before we go any further, we must put this in the proper context.  We conducted this survey of 100 business owners in our local area and and asked  a series of questions about how they managed ‘knowledge’ within their companies.  We were interested in finding out how the day-to-day operations and interactions of the business generated information and where that information was being kept.  Information such as customer correspondence, project status updates, orders, customer issues, daily revenue, and crisis situations.

As it turns out, a lot of this information was stored in e-mail and MS Word documents.  Many of the businesses we surveyed didn’t even have an office network so other employees could access these documents.  Almost no one had a ‘search’ feature implemented for people to find information and all of them used e-mail to store critical information about everything.

This was not surprising, as we had already read about this phenomenon in a myriad of blogs and articles online but we wanted to see first hand how these businesses perceived this problem.  Many of them didn’t even think it was a problem.  They are so entrenched in doing business this way, they were unable to see anything better!