Enterprise 2.0 : Corporate Wiki

There are already lots of blogs regarding Enterprise 2.0 , but it seems the topic is still not clear for the management. And that might be the reason why there are still lots of companies out, which are not starting with this topics. The management is the critical user group when the company introduces elements of the Enterprise 2.0. And they should be patient. This transformation takes time : it often need 2-3 years according to the german journal Wirtschaftswoche 28/10.

Wiki is not only Wikipedia

But back to the main topic of this blog: Corporate Wikis. Whenever i make an intro to non IT People about wikis, most think instantly of the website wikipedia. And why should a company have advantages from a fancy glossary….

First thing i reply is that a Wiki is not only an encyclopedia. A wiki is a website, where users can read but also edit the interlinked web pages using a WYSIWYG or a simplified markup language in the browser. A corporate wiki is one of the elements of Enterprise 2.0, other useful elements are blogs, RSS and Instant Messenging.

The majority of wikis are free and open source software developed collaboratively. Many wikis are modular, providing APIs which allow programmers to develop new features without requiring them to be familiar with the codebase.

There are lots of choices for Wikis available. So most companies try out a corporate wiki with the software from Wikipedia: Mediawiki or Sharepoint.

The company finds some interesting usage types for a corporate wikis :

• Documentation of the knowledge of your employees
  • Operational Procedures
  • Organizational structures
  • Expert knowledge
• Documentation to custom software within the company
  • Manuals
  • Collection of Hints and Hacks
• Collaborative Work on Projects, Concepts and Briefings
• Documentation of projects
• Collaborative Collection of data
  • Website Content creation
• Living Reports using different data sources

After a while the user find out that besides the requirements

• • WYSIWYG editing
  • full text search
  • revision control
  • email notification,
  • Tagging
  • PDF Creation
  • RSS Producer

A company wiki requirement needs additional requirements like

• Page access control for departments or projects
• Easy usage for uploading documents (e.g. Drag and Drop) and editing

And then they might find some Software for Enterprise Wiki like Confluence or Socialtext .

A video called “Wiki in plain English” can be found on youtube