Enterprise wiki

An enterprise wiki or corporate wiki is a wiki used in a corporate (or organizational) context, especially to enhance internal knowledge sharing.

Wikis are increasingly used internally by companies and public sector organizations, some as prominent as Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Intel, Microsoft and the United States Intelligence Community. Depending on the size of a corporation, they may add to or replace centrally-managed content management systems. Their decentralized nature allows them, in principle, to disseminate needed information across an organization more rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository. Wikis can also be used for project management (allowing better collaboration) and even marketing (as wikis for customers).

Features of corporate wikis

Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include:

• Allow to glue information via quick-and-easy-to-create pages containing links to other corporate information systems, like people directories, CMS, applications, and thus build up knowledge bases.
• Avoiding e-mail overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Conversely, only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden many subscribers with many messages, regardless of relevance to particular subscribers. It is also very useful for the project manager to have all the communication stored in one place, this allows them to link the responsibility for every action taken to a particular team member.
• Organizing information. Wikis allow users to structure new and existing information. As with content, the structure of data is sometimes also editable by users; see structured wiki. On the other hand wiki is not strictly hierarchical which might be a disadvantage in corporate context.
• Building consensus. Wikis provide a framework for collaborative writing. Particularly, they allow the structured expression of views disagreed upon by authors on a same page. This feature is very useful when writing documentation, preparing presentations and so on.
• Access rights, roles. Users can be forbidden from viewing and/or editing given pages, depending on their department or role within the organization.
• Knowledge management with comprehensive searches. This includes document and project management, as well as using a wiki as a knowledge repository useful during times of employee turnover, retirement and so on.

Corporate wiki solutions

See also: List of wiki software

See also: Comparison of wiki software

Nearly every notable wiki application has been used within corporations. A number of proprietary wiki applications have specifically marketed themselves as enterprise solutions, including Confluence, Socialtext, Jive SBS, SamePage, Microsoft SharePoint, which includes a wiki component, and Traction TeamPage. In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions, including Foswiki, which calls itself "the free and open source enterprise collaboration platform", TWiki, which calls itself "the Open Source Enterprise Wiki", XWiki and SMW⁺. Most other wiki applications, the majority of which are open source, do not specifically bill themselves as enterprise solutions, but rather as useful for a variety of different usages; though some, like Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and MediaWiki, have marketing materials geared for enterprise users.

See also

• Collaborative editing
• Collaborative writing
• Enterprise portal
• Enterprise social software
• Wiki software
• Wikinomics

References

• Andersen, Espen (2005). Using Wikis in a Corporate Context. In Handbuch E-Learning. A. Hohenstein and K. Wilbers (eds). Cologne, WoltersKluwer. 5.8: 15.
• Guy, Marieke (2006). Wiki or Won't He? A Tale of Public Sector Wikis. Ariadne Issue 49.
• Grzeganek, K.; Frost, I.; Gross, D (2011). Spoilt for Choice - Wiki Software for Knowledge Management in Organisations. Community of Knowledge.

External links

• "Wikis evolve as collaboration tools" - InfoWorld January 2007 review of proprietary enterprise wiki software
• "Corporate Wiki Users: Results of a Survey" — 2006 survey of 168 corporate wiki users