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.