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!

In another step toward making BrainKeeper an even better fit for subscribers with a larger user base, we have released a few new features that have been requested by those who want to have a bit more control over the content in their Page Notes and Blog Comments.  BrainKeeper already has full Page and Blog Post content approval workflow, so that one or many people can ensure that changes made within a Workspace are accurate and thorough.  With our latest release, we have added moderation for Notes and Comments, so that these can be held to the same standard as other content in BrainKeeper.

We have also centralized the documents within a Workspace so that they can be accessed easily from the Workspace Dashboard.  We will have more document management enhancements coming soon as well.

In addition, we have made enhancements to our Online Help, our Workspace Export, and a number of little features that make BrainKeeper an easy application to use- but powerful enough for any organization.

The next set of enhancements will be coming soon, and will include some items that we are all very excited about.  We are looking to continue building upon our collaboration features to facilitate more (and better) communication.

We are very excited to announce the addition of integrated Blogs to the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki!  You can now capture key thoughts and ideas from everyone in your company, and start dialogues about a wide range of topics.  We went through a number of designs before settling on the one that we released, and we have received very positive feedback from everyone who has used the blogging features so far.

One of the key initiatives for us when developing our Blog was to make sure it was integrated with our existing features.  We believe very strongly that major feature sets should work together tightly to get the most benefit out of an integrated system, so we made sure that tags, search, alerts, permissions, and workflow are all available in Blogs, the same way they are available for the Wiki.

There were a number of little modifications that were made to the wiki as well- we aimed to have those changes be subtle enough that they will not distract from how you use BrainKeeper, but they will be nice to have when you need them.  Among these new features is a content export capability, remote and embedded flash content integration, and some general design improvements.

We hope you find these enhancements valuable, and if you don't already have an account, we invite you to signup for a free trial to see our new Blogs for yourself.

The InnovationCreators Blog has a good video blog post making the business case for Corporate Blogging, definitely worth a watch.