There are a number of ways in which our Fortune 500 clients use the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki differently than our small business subscribers.  However, there is one thing that every wiki has in common: they all change as they grow.  Beyond the obvious changes to the individual wiki pages, blog posts, and forum threads- most wikis will progress through a maturity process, where the underlying structure of the wiki itself is evolved to meet the changing needs of your organization and the information you are capturing.

Many of the things that you do as a 50-person organization will not work when you grow to be a 200-person organization- and the same logic should apply to the systems that you use to support your efforts.  Regarding a wiki: you may start with just a few topic Workspaces, such as FAQs, Competitors, and Meeting Minutes.  This might work great for your team, but once other departments see the value that you are getting out of your BrainKeeper wiki, they will want to use it as well- so the structure needs to change to accommodate the additional needs.

There are a number of factors that can make you rethink the organization of your wiki, and you might consider this to be a daunting task.  However, with features like an enterprise search, tagging, and custom search fields, you can minimize any re-training that needs to be done- and BrainKeeper even comes with a number of features to make it very easy to change the structure of your information.  The extra time and effort spent to reorganize what you already have can really pay off in the long run.

The most important thing to know is that your wiki will grow and change organically.  In most cases, you should encourage this, since people will be working to improve your wiki for everyone.  You can also get some great insights to how people are using (or want to use) your wiki as your team evolves and grows.  If you can successfully embrace and understand the change, you will foster a more collaborative environment- which can lead to improvements across your entire organization.

We recently read a blog post that outlines some great ways that educational institutions can use an Enterprise Wiki. The post describes 50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom, and has a lot of great use cases that are pertinent to many classrooms of all levels of education.

There are a number of ideas that meet the needs of corporations and business teams as well.  Organizing ideas, group authoring, creating a glossary, and developing an FAQ library are all great examples of how any organization can benefit from a wiki.

One other point not to be overlooked is that there are 50 items in this list- and there could be many more.  One of the strengths of wikis is that they are so flexible, and having a flexible wiki within a complete enterprise web collaboration solution provides you with a way to enhance every part of your organization.

We recently added Discussion Forums to our Enterprise Wiki product, and we began to get requests in our demos for an explanation of when to use which collaboration tool.  So, we wanted to share our take on how each of these valuable collaboration features could be used effectively in an organization. 

WIKIS - Wikis are used primarily to capture knowledge and information.  Wikis are intended to be living repositories that can be contributed to by everyone, which provides a more complete, accurate, and relevant view of key knowledge.  Even though a wiki page should never be considered "complete" (changes happen all the time), they are meant to capture information that can be referenced for longer periods of time.  In addition to knowledge management, shared content editing, notification, status reports, data collection, and project management are all excellent uses of a wiki.

BLOGS - Blogs are a great way to broadcast news or get quick feedback.  Unlike wiki pages, blog posts are usually very time-sensitive, so they have less relevance as time passes.  An example is that someone creates a blog post to comment on an article they found online.  If that post was made a year ago and was about the soaring sales of Sport Utility Vehicles, that would have very little relevance today.  There is interesting perspective to be found in historical blog posts, however.  If someone brings up an idea that was shot down 2 years ago because of the feedback in blog comments, you can go back and see what the reasons were.

FORUMS - Forums organize complex conversations and help you make decisions.  Email is terrible for complex conversations.  How many times have you gotten an email blast that asks you to comment on 5 different bullet points- only to try to follow the responses from everyone else.  And then having the main conversation breaks off into several side conversations- only a few of which you might care about.  Forums solve that by following a trial of thought about each point in the discussion.  Than, at the end of the conversation, you have a great resource to make decisions that you can be confident in- since everyone can participate and give their perspective.

We do believe that every team, department, and organization is different- so we encourage you to find as many ways to enhance collaboration as you possibly can.  If you have specific questions about how to use these tools to improve your organization, just let us know!