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 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!

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.

Software as a Service continues to gain momentum in the area of collaboration and knowledge management as decision-makers become more comfortable with the ideas of having their information stored offsite, not having to worry about security or accessibility, and entrusting others with the overall performance of their mission-critical systems.  In this post we'll address that last one: performance.

A major problem with installed software when comparing it to hosted software is that it takes quite a while to develop new releases, and so new technologies, methodologies, and simple (yet brilliant) ideas may wait for two of those long release cycles (since the current release is already set) before they end up in the product.  Releases for hosted software can be days, rather than months.

Case in point, we are working on a few new features that are aimed at improving the overall performance of the BrainKeeper application.  By forging a partnership with the IT teams of our subscribers, we were able to focus on the areas that we wanted to target- and we have seen some great preliminary results.

Another point along these lines is that we were only able to develop these improvements quickly and get the desired performance boost because we developed our application from scratch.  Building an enterprise wiki on top of an open-source platform can work, but knowing every function has a number of great advantages.

This is why Software as a Service works as well as it does; by being a partner with your clients, having an environment where you can release enhancements when clients need them- not when it is convenient, and having improvements made by the same people who developed the core architecture- you are served much better than with traditional software.  Especially with a Web 2.0 application like an enterprise wiki, such as BrainKeeper.

We attended the New New Internet conference last week, which focused on emerging web technologies and the application of the products, features and concepts that have been grouped into Web 2.0.  As with most conferences, there were speakers and presenters who really know their stuff, and those who only think they do.

Overall, the conference was great, and reaffirmed that wikis, blogs, social networks, and mash-ups have some very tangible and unique benefits to business, government, and educational organizations.  Improving communication and collaboration are still some of the biggest challenges faced by businesses, and many of the presenters aim to address various aspects of a solution.  Some of the high points were:

Product presentations from HonestyOnline, Spigit, and talk2CHIP.  Spigit stood out to me because of the completeness of their vision for their product.  They have social networking features that allow collaboration and bring the best ideas and concepts to the attention of decision makers, which is all well and good- but they also have a customizable workflow engine so that those ideas can get pushed through an integrated process.  In a world where capturing ideas is a focus, it is refreshing to find a product that helps to implement those great ideas.

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek were both excellent.  If you are not familiar with either of these works, we highly recommend them.  The perspective that these concepts give you can truly influence the decisions you make every day.  They can also notably improve the way you collaborate with your team, department, and organization as a whole.

The most intriguing product (yes, it will be a product) that will be released soon is Mash Maker, the mash-up application developed by Intel.  The demo went far beyond the traditional on-line map mash-up and offered a potentially significant influence to the development of the semantic web.  The next year will be very interesting for collecting, classifying, and relating web content.  The implications to wikis are readily apparent, and we will be looking for ways to tap into these technology evolutions.

Over the past few months, we have demonstrated how BrainKeeper can provide a great deal of value to Fortune 500 companies as well as SMBs.  Our products scale very well, and we continue to focus on building features that make collaboration and knowledge management incredibly simple.

The main reason people tell us that they purchase BrainKeeper over others is because our product is so intuitive and easy to use.  This also makes BrainKeeper relatively easy to sell.  If you are a business manager who needs a better way to communicate with clients, partners, and internal team members- BrainKeeper is an ideal solution. 

The combination of a proven Enterprise Wiki solution with a simple sales effort has created quite a bit of interest in an affiliate program.  We have decided to embrace this idea and create the first official BrainKeeper Affiliate Program.  Currently, we are running several pilot affiliate relationships to ensure that the program is exactly what we want it to be: a way for us to get the word out about BrainKeeper, and a revenue generating channel for our affiliates.

Our pilot program (essentially a more mature 'beta') is still open for a few more participants, but we expect to have this program up and running soon- so if you are interested, please contact us at info@brainkeeper.com.  We look forward to hearing from you.

For additional contact information, please visit us at www.brainkeeper.com/corp/contact.php.

We continue to be encouraged by the number and types of organizations that find wikis to be an effective tool for managing knowledge and communication.  BrainKeeper earned the subscription of a major telecommunications and media conglomerate this week, which adds to our list of marquee customers in the industries of technology, education, and consulting.  All of these may seem like they would be a natural fit for an Enterprise Wiki tool, but we have seen a number of our subscribers come from markets outside of those that might find wiki's to be attractive.

We also have a number of significant clients in the fields of Law, Healthcare, Tax, Pharmaceuticals, Veterinary Medicine, Finance, Architecture, Manufacturing, and Retail.  It shows that everyone is looking for collaboration solutions- and a wiki is the next stage of enterprise collaboration that answers a number of problems with email, chat, and other more traditional communication methods.

With our next enhancement release, we will continue to focus on more and better ways to capture, collaborate, and deliver information to you and the people you work with.  We welcome any thoughts you might have toward this, and invite you to take a free trial of BrainKeeper to see it for yourself.

There is an excellent article in Information Weekposted last week that discusses how CIOs are gaining influence in companies to make both strategic and tactical corporate decisions.  This comes in response to the steady increase of new tools in the market that help businesses do core activities better than they can.

The dot com crash was filled with examples of startups that failed because they were trying to appeal to a very broad audience in order to capture as much market as possible.  We now see the emergence of startups who do only a few things, but do them very well.  This model presents its own challenges, but at least employees of these new startups can be focused on a very clear, distinct set of goals.

Established companies are now looking to these startups for innovative ways to stay ahead of the competition and bolster their own offerings.  Much of this innovation is done through technology, and thus the expanded influence of the CIO role. 

Furthermore, startups are making it very easy for CIOs to evaluate a wide range of products to find the best fit.  Many companies, like BrainKeeper, offer no-obligation free trials and a pay-per-month option so that the risk of implementation is very low.  And switching can be very simple; since we can import content from a MediaWiki system, you can be up and running with a new BrainKeeper wiki in days- with zero implementation and maintenance costs.

There are also a large number of new offerings that come to market every day- particularly in the Web 2.0 space, so a high ranking technology officer is needed to manage the efforts to sift through these products to find the ones that really match the goals of the corporation.  As startups fail, more take their place so that there is never a truly established set of tools.  While Google's office suite has yet to be proven, they do show that even the most established players in the market may not be the best for everyone.

Software companies have forever struggled to make systems easier to use, more intuitive, and reduce barriers to adoption.  Large-scale Enterprise Software struggles with this aspect, as more customization, configurations and complex features make it very difficult to maintain an application that everyone can easily use.  Small companies tend to develop features that losely fit into their core offering, so while individual aspects of thier systems are intuitive, using the entire system effectively requires knowledge about how all of the features work together.  Or, the system is too simple to meet the needs of the people who use it.

At BrainKeeper, we believe that We have found the perfect formula for having a powerful tool that is also incredibly easy to use.  We do this thorugh a variety of ways:

1.  We have an established product roadmap.  We have a vision of where we want BrainKeeper to be in 2 weeks, in 6 months, and in the next year.  This helps everyone at our company make decisions about what features should be implemented and how they should be integrated.  Also, when one of our clients gives us a great new idea, we can easily see how it should fit in to the full product so that it doesn't feel like an add-on.

2.  We don't re-invent the wheel.  Sounds simple enough, but you would be suprised how often this happens.  Doing something different does not always mean that it is better!  A great example of this is our hierarchy feature, which allows users to nagvigate through wiki pages like Windows folders.  Business people don't think of information as a web of interlinked content, and they are already familiar with a hierarchy.  But, we wanted the ease of creating pages on the fly, so you end up with the best of both worlds.

3.  Get feedback!  Everything that we develop is previewed, commented on, redesigned, and polished before it is added to BrainKeeper.  "Intuitive" does not mean the same thing to everyone, so we make every effort to appeal to the largest group of people possible.

4.  Make sure it meets the need.  Every feature and function is a tool to help a user achieve a goal.  "I need to answer a question", "I need to capture my thoughts" or "I need to prepare a report"- we give you the tools you need to manage your communication and your knowledge, and we make sure the bells and whistles are as helpful as the core technology.

Developing software with an interface that is intuitive enough for everyone is a very challenging goal.  But it is one of the most important aspects to BrainKeeper and we will continue to work toward this with every feature that we develop.

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about leveraging the power of the wiki for team collaboration in the workplace. While traditional wiki products have proven to be excellent collaborative tools, they can be disruptive to existing business processes. BrainKeeper aims to bridge the gap between this wiki utopia and the requirements of existing corporate culture.

Structure

Businesses need more structure than most existing wikis provide. Knowledge cannot simply be thrown into a tangled web of interlinking pages, inevitably lost to the wiki ether. People who are new to the wiki concept often discover that finding the right information can be extremely difficult, especially when wiki pages are not interlinked correctly. BrainKeeper addresses this concern with a fully expandable hierarchy in addition to traditional wiki links. The added structure aids business users who may be accustomed to traditional folder/file hierarchies.

Business Process Integration

The issue of adoption is perhaps the most difficult challenge for next generation collaboration tools. This stems mainly from the fact that businesses are reluctant to change existing business processes. BrainKeeper's mission is to augment these existing processes, not change the way people do business at a fundamental level. This is accomplished primarily through a flexible Approval Workflow feature, which allows power users and knowledge experts to monitor content within their respective spheres of knowledge.

You can learn more about our products at our website: www.brainkeeper.com