There are numerous examples of successful open source wiki implementations throughout the internet. Wikipedia is the most well known of these, which is built on the MediaWiki open source software. Hoping to see the same type of viral adoption and enhanced collaboration in their organizations, more and more people are looking into wikis for a wide range of needs, and many of these people look at open source software as their first option. There are situations in which an open source wiki is right for an organization- but it also could be a big mistake.

There are several main reasons why open source software appeals to people (which tend to be more technical than the average employee). A large user community to help troubleshoot installation and configuration issues can be a big factor, as is having familiarity with the software if you are an active user of Wikipedia or other wiki-based sites. Most often, however, the biggest motivator is the fact that open source software is free- but is it really? Taking everything into consideration, could your open source wiki project actually end up costing you more money than subscribing to an online Wiki Software service?

Ultimately, you are interested in a wiki to centralize information, be it an intranet, a knowledge base, or a collaboration center- all with the goals of saving time to access information and answer critical questions. How much time would you spend to install, configure, backup, integrate, and maintain your own wiki? Add the cost of the hardware to run it and the extra strain on your infrastructure. Just compare the days of work and added costs of open source to the minutes it takes to get started with the BrainKeeper wiki- which has zero impact on your IT. We offer a 30-day free trial, so you can have a 60-day pilot for 10 people for only $35.

Something else to keep in mind with open source wikis is that if your wiki is a success, your entire company may want to have access to it. Will you have the time to teach everyone how to use wiki syntax? Will you be able to work around any quirks of the system until a new version comes out? Training, writing documentation, and developing workarounds all take even more time to keep your wiki running smoothly.

With an online enterprise wiki like the one offered by BrainKeeper, you get an ideal situation: you can try it out with very little risk, and if it becomes a success, you will have a provider that you can trust to deliver on your goals of knowledge sharing and enhanced collaboration.

See for yourself by signing up for a free trial: http://www.brainkeeper.com/free

The battle for Wikipedia's soul, an article published in a recent issue of The Economist, touches on the semi-political struggles within the Wikipedia "organization" between Inclusionists (those who think everything should be in Wikipedia) and Deletionists (those who feel fewer but more important/noteworthy articles should be included).  While the article does an outstanding job of laying out the differences between these two groups of Wikipedia users and the arguments behind each point of view, of greater interest to us is the larger concept of what should be included in a Wiki, specifically an internal Corporate Wiki. 

One concern we hear on occasion is if you include too much in your Wiki, you may run the risk of Users getting frustrated with having to wade through too much information to find what they are looking for, or simply being overwhelmed by the shear volume of information available.  However, we feel that if you use a Wiki with enhanced features such as content filtering, fine-grained searching and tagging, along with organizing your information appropriately and consistently, these concerns will be greatly minimized.  While you certainly do not want to include everything under the sun, such as outdated company forms or personal musings (use a personal blog for those), the "less is more" route should definitely be avoided.

When an organization severely restricts what goes into their Enterprise Wiki, they are in effect limiting its ability to grow naturally.  If there are doubts about what should go into your Wiki, then you risk losing the benefits of contributions by the more cautious people in your organization.  In contrast, if you do everything you can to encourage people to contribute anything they believe to be relevant, you will be amazed how much valuable information, enhanced collaboration, and great ideas will come out of using a Wiki.  By embracing a diverse but logically organized body of knowledge from the beginning, you will always help spur adoption and increase activity- which is the true measure of success for your Wiki.

One of the most important things to us is to make sure that our subscribers are kept very well informed when we release new features.  But we wanted to do more than just provide a notification and a summary of what is new- we wanted to describe why the new features we develop are valuable, and show how they contribute to enhancing collaboration within the Enterprise Wiki.

In addition, for new subscribers, we wanted to highlight tips, use cases, and highlight specific features to ensure that everyone is getting everything they need out of BrainKeeper.  The more you know what is available, the easier and more powerful the Enterprise Wiki becomes for an organization.

Lastly, we wanted to make sure people took advantage of the thoughts and perspectives that are expressed in our Enterprise Collaboration Blog.  We aim to post about relevant opinions, research, news, methods, and updates to everything having to do with enterprise collaboration and knowledge management (as well as keep you updated as to what we are doing, like this post...).

So, to address all of these areas, we have published the first BrainKeeper Enterprise Collaboration Newsletter.  You can access the latest issue on our website, and sign up to receive it as well.  We invite you to subscribe if you have not already, and as always- we would love to hear what you think.

CIO Insight recently published an excellent article, Collaboration: Unlocking the Power of Teams, which details the Ziff Davis Enterprise 2008 Collaboration Survey.  While the article is extremely interesting and well worth the read, some of the statistics from the survey are simply astounding.

"We discovered that about 80 percent of IT executives believe collaboration and workflow technologies deliver on their promise to boost productivity and decision-making, and half say they enable and even inspire strategies that were previously unattainable or unimaginable."

With findings like that, it's no wonder that:

"Organizations will increase their spending on collaboration software by 14.8 percent in 2008, according to the Ziff Davis Enterprise February 2008 IT Spending Survey. "

Additionaly, the graphic on Page 4 of the article shows that while Wikis are ranked as the 16th most used collaboration technology within Organizations, they are the 4th most used without IT Support.  So eventhough 20% of the responding organizations use Wikis without the support of their IT department, they are still used more than other technologies such as Blogs (22nd) and Realtime Document Collaboration (21st).  Furthermore, while Discussion Forums have been a mainstay on the (consumer) web for many years now, Wikis were tied with Discussion Forums as 16th most used.

If you are interested in what technologies are most used or percieved as being most valuable, this article is definitely worth a read.

We have talked about our partnership with Smartsheet.com in the recent past, but we have now completed the integration between our products, and we are thrilled with what we were able to do.  Just as when we added Blogs to our Enterprise Wiki, we didn't want the Smartsheet integration to feel like something that had been bolted on to the core interface- we really wanted it to feel like a natural extension of BrainKeeper.  With the help of the Smartsheet.com team, we think that we were able to come up with a great solution.

We felt like there was a need to keep tasks, lists, and other structured content in the same place as your knowledgebase, idea, and collaboration software.  After looking at a number of alternatives, we sought out Smartsheet because of the unique collaborative aspects to their product- which mirrored BrainKeeper in many ways.  Smartsheet really is the perfect complement to the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki.

To give you a better sense for exactly what Smartsheet does, here is an exerpt from the Press Release:

"Smartsheet gives you task management features that make it easy to get things done. With Smartsheet, you can easily create custom lists, assign due dates, and identify next steps. Quickly view recent changes made by team members and keep track of where things stand. Additional features including real-time alerts and e-mail based update requests that post directly to your Smartsheet."

We are glad to have Smartsheet.com as a trusted BrainKeeper partner, and we hope you enjoy having Smartsheets available from within your BrainKeeper Wiki.  As always, please let us know if you have any feedback for us- regarding this or anything else.

You have emails...lots and lots of emails!  Don't we all?  Each email is usually either a notification from someone or an ongoing discussion between two or more people (hopefully you aren't emailing yourself!). 

These "discussion" emails generally allow you to scroll through all previous messages in order to get your bearings on the conversation, but what happens if the whole thread is not included?  Or when you forward the discussion on to someone else and then you have 2 "copies" of the discussion going on with 2 groups of people?  Sound familiar?  What you need is not just context, but "context-state".

So, what is context-state, you ask?  Let's define it first:

Con - text n.
The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning
Dictionary.com

State n.
The condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes.

Dictionary.com

Taking these two definitions together, context-state would be something like:

The condition of a text or statement used to determine its meaning

Okay, this time so it actually makes sense:

The ability to look at some text (information) and always have the necessary information to easily determine the context of that text.

This is exactly what email cannot do.  Will your email software tell you about the Word document on your desktop related to the conversation?  Or the Excel spreadsheet in you're My Documents folder that really needs to be reviewed in order to fully understand the content of the email?  Probably not.

Enter a Wiki.  Not just any Wiki mind you, but a good Enterprise Wiki.  One that allows you to capture your knowledge, tag (categorize) it, attach related files, invite other people to comment on it and determine who should be able to view or edit it with Wiki Permissions.

Obviously, we are a little biased, and fully believe that the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki solves this problem better than most, but solving the problem is more important than the Enterprise Wiki tool that you use to solve it.

Back to our example:
That email you are about to send off to 5 people to kick-start a conversation, put it into your Wiki instead as a Wiki Page.  Now, email the page (from within your Wiki of course) to those same 5 people, and ask them to add some comments to the page, or (gasp) go real crazy and ask them to just edit it (don't worry, you'll be able to see who made what changes later). 

So, now you have this conversation happening within your Wiki, and everyone is on the same "Page" with this conversational knowledge.  Now what?  Why not add a tag or two to the Page?  This not only provides additional context so that other people know the topics covered within the Page, but also allows even deeper context by providing the ability to browse those tags and see other related content . 

By tagging your information within an online Wiki (state!), you can extend its context, and therefore make it easier for other people to quickly figure out what is going on (context-state!).

So, you ask again, what is context-state? Is it putting your knowledge where others can access it?  Attaching related files to it?  Tagging that knowledge?  It's all of the above, and then some.  It's also being able to see who has made the most changes and who is truly the Expert for specific knowledge.

Wikis are great tools; combine them with Blogs for your Organization and they are even better.  Use them to their fullest, and you might think that they were sent from above.