October 2008 Archives

Build an intranet in under 10 minutes

October 26, 2008
Corporate intranets are used for everything from a centralized set of web links to a comprehensive information center for everyone in an organization.  It is relatively easy and cheap to create a simple intranet, but there is not much value.  Creating an intranet that contains all of your organization's information can take months, and you can spend thousands of dollars to create it.  The time and money to get up and running (and to maintain it) rarely gives you the ROI you are looking for. 

However, you can create a BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki, add users from your team, and start creating your first page of content in less than 10 minutes.  No need to burden your IT team or take resources away from other projects.  BrainKeeper is one of the fastest solutions to implement on the market, and you can get your team started for under $50 a month- which is usually well within any budget.

BrainKeeper gives you everything you need to capture and share your knowledge.  You also get excellet business collaboration features to automatically grow your intranet.  So, what about the content?  While BrainKeeper does offer a number of features that make it much easier to get content into your wiki, it does take a bit of time to get information out of email inboxes, shared drives, and people's heads.  However, one of the great things about using a wiki is that everyone has the ability (and the responsibility) to add content that is relevant for the organization. 

When an intranet is allowed to grow organically, you remove much of the maintenance burden while also capturing the most relevant, important information.  When you let your people decide what needs to be shared, you significantly reduce your maintenance burden, and everyone has a stake in keeping their content up to date.  BrainKeeper is a great solution to quickly create a new intranet for your organization.

5 ways that wikis help you cut costs

October 17, 2008

With all of the woefully bad economic news over the past several weeks, organizations are naturally looking to cut costs.  This usually takes the form of delaying projects, cutting back on outsourcing and contracted work, and generally trying to do more with less.  These are hard decisions to make, and the downstream effects can be quite harmful to productivity.  So, how do you make sure that you stay on track when your resources are scarce?

Here are 5 ways that an enterprise collaboration tool can help:

  1. Prevent knowledge loss.  Cutting resources is a very difficult decision to make because the organization loses the knowledge that departing employees have.  This means that people are not as productive because answers are no longer readily available.  However, if you use a wiki for knowledge management, you never have to worry about key information leaving your organization.
  2. More effective use of resources.  Enterprise collaboration software can help you do the same work with fewer resources.  Instead of preparing reports and having meetings to discuss things like competitors, industry news, and company issues- capture those things in BrainKeeper and let the software distribute that information and collect feedback.  You can get back hours of your day!
  3. Make decisions and execute.  Meetings are not needed to make every decision.  And most everyone has regretted making some decision over email (you didn't CC the right people, responses were misinterpreted, etc.).  Use BrainKeeper Forums to quickly gather feedback and opinions from everyone, and make the best decision.
  4. Keep track of stalled projects.  When resources are cut or reassigned, projects can be halted for weeks or even months.  If your discussions, decisions, analysis, ideas, and strategies are all kept within collaboration software- you can pick up right where you left off.
  5. Be prepared for next time.  The economy rises and falls, just as your revenues and resources do.  By using an enterprise wiki, you can make the best possible decisions for your organization.  While your competitors are struggling, you will be able to stay on track and have a significant advantage under any market conditions.