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!

Email is a great communication tool, but it is not a great tool for collaboration.  By the very nature of email, the only people who benefit from the knowledge contained within them are the people on the trail.  Since everyone in a company does not operate on a shared In-box, ideas and decisions will always lack a degree of perspective and creativity- and they will be less thorough.

When you are building knowledge that others can benefit from, working with clients and partners, or making decisions that affect other aspects of the company- a wiki is a perfect tool.  Using this criteria, our subscribers have decreased their email traffic by over 30%!  No more FYI emails, no more having to answer repetitive questions, and no more searching your email for a nugget of information that you know is trapped in an email somewhere...

The bottom line is that wikis give you the right tool for collaboration.  Wikis are not a replacement for email- they are a replacement for a void that email was filling for us, temporarily.  Organizations now have the perfect tool to improve both communication and collaboration.  To see how BrainKeeper does this, sign up for a free trial.

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.

We can shout from the rooftops about the benefits and advantages your business gains by making a wiki available to your organization, but we always like to advertise when an independent analysis proves our point for us.  This posting gives some great insights to the value a wiki can provide, how they are viewed in the corporate world, and how to achieve success with them.

Click to read: Managing Wikis in Business

We hope you find her research to be as spot-on as we do.  And if you have any questions about how BrainKeeper can help you achieve better communication and collaboration with a wiki, just let us know.

We have known for quite a while that people, teams and businesses have trouble managing their electronic information.  But the findings of a recent research report by the content management company AIIM put a number to the level of pain that is felt by this lack of management: 52% of companies rate their overall effectiveness in managing electronic information as terrible.

Certainly, the number is staggering enough, but to call the existing management of information "terrible" is also very telling.  I believe the reason for this is that it is so easy to get electronic information management wrong.  As a company grows, changes, and matures, the structures and processes put in place lose their effectiveness and have to be modified.  But in the case of electronic information, there is usually so much data that the job of managing it is completely impossible.

The common culprits of poor information management are shared network drives (where nothing can be found), isolated repositories (from a thumb drive to an old desktop that is still clinging to the network because you have hidden it under your desk), and 'Gatekeepers' (those people who make a living by being the single source for creating and maintaining large amounts of information).  These are the problems that we hoped to solve with the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki.

We have enough structure to help you find what you are looking for, but it is flexible to be easily modified if needed.  Tagging and other classification capabilities also help build structures on the fly so that content is constantly updated to be relevant to what matters to your company today- not 5 years ago.  The idea that anyone can contribute anything for the greater good breaks down all real and perceived barriers to getting ideas and opinions out of your staff.

Software should empower you to do a better job- whatever your job is.  A wiki is the most empowering software that you can offer to your team and your organization.  See how one can work for you with a free trial.

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.

In our last post, we mentioned that we had some big news: We recently received an invitation to one of the more notable conferences for technology startups: Under the Radar.   

Their topic this year is "Why Office 2.0 Matters", which we fit into very well.  It appears that we did quite well in an ad-hoc poll that asked about what Web 2.0 companies were likely to do well in the coming year.  We are certainly very appreciative to everyone who voted for us, and are honored to have been selected to attend the Under the Radar conference this year. 

Read more about the conference here.
Read their review of BrainKeeper here. 

In addition to being noticed by Under the Radar, we have been talking to a number of media outlets and prospective buyers, who have been giving us some very positive feedback.  One of the most common questions we are asked is about what we will be building into BrainKeeper next. 

There are a few things we are working on that we don't want to give away quite yet, but we can say that we are responding to a number of requests from our clients (thanks to everyone who has signed up so far).  We are improving and refining pieces of our interface, and allowing for some additional configuration options.  In addition, we are also working on a full site style customization feature that will allow you to modify the look of BrainKeeper to match your organization. 

Beyond that, it looks like our next major developments will be done right around the Under the Radar conference.  We'll be posting more about that when the time comes.