Wikis Unleashed

We Matter

2011-03-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

eTouch was named one of KMWorld's 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management. After being included in August 2010 as one of KMWorld's Trend Setting Products of 2010, we were really honored to also be included in this knowledge-management-specific list.

Read the eTouch press release, our CEO blog post and KMWorld article.

A Fire Hose of Information

2011-02-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

My interest was immediately piqued by the startling title -- "Don't You Dare Email This Story" -- of this article in The Wall Street Journal.

The article is about information overload. No surprises there, as we're overloaded with information at every turn from colleagues, friends, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, with news articles, blogs and so on and so on. We can't seem to take a vacation during which we can completely disconnect, often because of the fear of even more overload when we return relaxed and refreshed.

The reporter begins her article with this stat:

"Information workers, who comprise about 63% of the U.S. work force, are each bombarded with 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more, according to preliminary data from a report coming later this year, an update of the 2003 "How Much Information?" report."

But it gets more interesting as reporter Andrea Coombes writes:

"U.S. companies lose an estimated $900 billion a year in lost productivity because of information overload, according to Basex, a research and consulting firm."

Wait, what? We have so much information, it is making us unproductive. Geesh. Didn't you think it was supposed to do the opposite? I mean, our competitors can't catch us off guard because we're reading the same things they are every day; and we're always on the bleeding edge of industry trends, because we know what everyone is doing and thinking every minute. If only that was the case.

Instead, a lot of this great 'content' out there is just noise. Not all of it; there's lots of important, successful thought leaders saying and writing valuable things. But we have to weed through it all - separate the weak from the chaff. It isn't easy to do. Tools can help.

This WSJ reporter gives suggestions, and there are some valuable tips in there.

I've found that sharing links, sites, articles and an occasional IM session to get status updates with my colleagues on our wiki that functions as our intranet works wonders.

What works for you?

A Wiki for All Reasons

2011-01-25T11:34:00.000-08:00

Just to keep you in the loop, this week we announced another new client. As always, I find it fascinating all the different types of enterprises and ventures with a wiki commonality.

This time, SamePage was selected by Growth Dynamics International (GDI) as the secure networking, collaboration and content-management platform for members of its online learning website, Lifelong Learning Community. Its global members will take online courses, complete private assignments, as well as shared work, and interact regularly with other members in groups and discussions.

It's kind of a self-help / motivational group with common goals and interests. Not an 'enterprise' group, by any means. Yet they should benefit tremendously from having a secure platform that allows them to share select information, collaboration worldwide and work together.

“We spent quite a bit of time researching potential solutions before we came upon SamePage and knew it was the perfect solution for our collaboration, security, information-sharing and content needs,” said Doug Fike, director of GDI, which founded L3Community.com. “Most CMS options didn’t allow for enough collaboration; more socially focused options didn’t have the structure and security we needed. SamePage offers the best combination for our virtual community, and it is easy to use for our non-technical members.”

Read more about SamePage document management and security features.

What do you use your wiki for?

Content Migration's a Snap

2011-01-17T16:45:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, I spoke with a reporter from EContent Magazine about content migration. She was interested in learning about the process, however difficult or easy it may be, of moving content into a new and better software product. [The article is slated for the March issue, and I'll post it when it's live.] Of course, she didn't only want to hear from me about how great SamePage enterprise wiki features are, so we got in touch with a customer.

I put her in touch with Dave Collins, the founder of Penchant Software, which is now a division of 3PD, the nation's largest direct-to-home delivery company. I hadn't previously heard much detail about Dave's experiences with SamePage. I was thrilled when he raved about his migration to our enterprise wiki software, made easy with our Universal Import Tool. Dave had so much valuable insight into the process that we decided to interview him more and put together a case study about his process and experiences.

You can download the case study PDF from http://etouch.net/customers/testimonial.html.

Dave transitioned his massive HELP desk documents into SamePage a few years ago after learning about wikis in an MBA program. (Hooray for Web 2.0-savvy university professors!) His biggest concerns with a migration were that he couldn't have a lot of down time, and he couldn't lose ANY documentation, videos, hyperlinks or anything else. With the use of our tool, he didn't.

“I had no idea how fast it would be, but it was great,” recalls Collins. “With the next release, we modified our help URL to go directly to the wiki, and that was it. Being so easy – that’s what you always hope for.”

SamePage immediately made Dave's life easier.

“SamePage removed all of our choke points…. It’s a million times better process for managing and updating content," explains Collins. The sky's the limit. SamePage is an easy way to quickly organize a large amount of content. It doesn't need much training...”

Read more about Penchant's easy migration to SamePage.

A Little Bit Older

2010-12-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

Another year is rapidly coming to a close. It'd been a fun, fast-moving and enjoyable; but most importantly productive!

It's probably a bit cliche, but I always look forward to reading year-end insights and predictions for the coming year. The predictions aren't always mind-blowing. I mean, come on, could anyone (not at Apple) have predicted the iP ad? But it interests me to see what the industry pundits reflect on and predict.

Here are some recent posts I've enjoyed:

- Ani Gadre, eTouch CEO likes the growing collaboration the enterprise 2.0 marketplace is seeing, anticipates a greater blurring of the lines between knowledge management, collaboration and enterprise 2.0.
- Ron Miller, editor of Fierce Content Management, sees predictions as a necessary evil and does a closing report on his 2010 predictions. His 2011 predictions will come next week.
- Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group says research reveals corporate focus on integration, staffing, advertising and measurement in 2011.
- Deb Lavoy on CMS Wire believes we can't make predictions, "we can only set our direction and respond to what happens....developing our vision and making it come true."
- Read Write Web Enterprise reported on Gartner's 2011 predictions of strong growth for enterprise SaaS and social software.

There will be more predictions in the next week, I'm sure, and I'll read them with interest. One thing is for sure -- Enterprise 2.0 will continue becoming increasingly established as a viable area in which companies will invest in order to make better use of internal knowledge.

Here's to a happy, healthy and successful 2011! Cheers.

E2.0 Meets Human Resources @E2.0 Conference

2010-11-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

I've been reading about the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara and a few perspectives emerged. From some people, it sounds like the show was the same old thing, while others either had a different experience or are just better able to capture the essence of what is new and different. Some round-up articles I like include Ron Miller's editorial in Fierce Content Management and Gil Yehuda's 'What You Should Learn..." blog post.

I have also enjoyed the feature that allows you to watch the keynotes online. There was a panel keynote session I found very interesting entitled, "HR Meets E2.0 and the Cloud." They almost lost me at the beginning of the session, as the discussion centered mostly around Facebook and Twitter. I get that these social networking sites are increasingly important for business, specifically recruiting as it pertains to this discussion, but they are on the line between enterprise and social and I don't consider them enterprise products. Anyway, it wasn't long before they got back on track (for me) and the discussion was very interesting.

It's always fascinating to hear end-users talk excitedly and openly about their internal processes and how they get to true enterprise software deployments that have a real impact on the company. And that's what I heard about in this session.

In fact, Kiera Smith from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publishing company, made what I see as the most striking point of the discussion. She explained that if HR departments want to make changes, it is important to start viral - don't wait for top-down approvals to go ahead with an E2.0-based programs. Her department started with free software solutions in order to prove capability of the solutions and show C-level management that it was worthwhile and the company could truly benefit from them. She gained the confidence of the users and built up a user base and was then able to bring solutions into the firewall. It's an approach I talk to daily with prospective customers, but it carries weight coming from a company that succeeded this way.

Other panel members included Eric Lane from Intuit, Oliver Marks from Soros and ZDNet and Tony Treglia from T2 HR Consulting. They talked to onboarding and offboarding, knowledge transfer, employee retention, managing performance, guidelines and advice for other companies.

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but any worker has to be optimized early, said Intuit's Lane. There's a heavy focus on making somebody effective quickly to get value; and the employee will feel more engaged and productive. Marks added that collaboration silos within the E2.0 solution work great; employees are looking for clarity of purpose.

Treglia made an important point that some companies today do still block sites like Facebook and that traditionally, HR departments are slow to adopt to new mediums. One example: "We can use Facebook to post new jobs, but the site is blocked internally."

Companies will have to come to grips with situations like this and be prepared to change policies to meet the needs of the changing workforce, their knowledgebase and the places they go for inspiration. Marks explained that there's a huge collision between the social marketing world and enterprise when it comes to onboarding.

Lane stressed that every E2.0 technology has to work together edge-to-edge. He said they started with 10 on-premise systems and now has only 2 - the rest are in the cloud.

Happy World PaperFree Day!

2010-10-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

Did you know that today, October 28, is World PaperFree Day?! AIIM has declared it so.

AIIM, if you don't already know, is a non-profit organization community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information. AIIM is asking people to do the following today:

1. Conscientiously make a point to not PRINT
2. Investigate a business process or technology that can cut the paper waste in your office
3. Participate in or Produce a local Paper Free Day event

In the video AIIM created, there are 8 key tips to use less paper in the long term. I'm going to focus on number 3: Use Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and blogs for internal communication and collaboration.

There are a number of key benefits to organizations and enterprises with going to wikis and blogs in an effort to use less paper, including:

It saves money. There are so many affordable or even free web 2.0 options out there today, that the money spent on printing and reprinting customer materials and the like can be prohibitive.
It saves time. Changes and collaboration take place in real time. With a wiki, you don't have to worry if someone got your file attachment via email.
It's green. But don't take my word for it. “We’re in such a green environment now that when we’re able cost effectively cut out the printing and the shipping and save on all that paper, that’s a pretty big thing,” said DICE client services and head of marketing, Melissa Courville.
More content, less noise. The content development and collaboration process is centralized in a wiki. So there's no need for 5 people to print, edit and then email around for everyone else to do the same.
It's easier to maintain for the long term. The thought of moving all corporate documentation, or files, or whatever you're working with, into a wiki seems daunting and time-consuming. But it's not necessary to do it all at once. You can do it gradually, or as things come up, or hire an intern to scan and categorize everything and create quick wiki pages. whatever system you use to get it on there, the important part to remember is that once it's digital, it can live there forever - static or changing.
Less emails. This ties in to many of the points above in this list. There is a movement for email-free lives. I'm not ready for that myself, but I do love the idea of less emails with bulky attachments that people have to print to compare versions, review or otherwise work with.
It's the future.

I am prepared to live up to AIIM's three requests of me today. Are you?

Watch the video to hear more about AIIM's mission and the other 7 tips that will help you help your group or organization to use less paper.

It takes a village....or a community

2010-10-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk these days about online communities. With the proliferation of social networks, these online communities are now so valuable for connecting with people we know or have known in our lives, people with whom we work and others we may not have ever met in person but with whom we share interests and other similarities.

It's a fun idea to think that someone in Idaho or Italy or Indiana can have the same challenge with a software or the exact same idea about how to do something better. And now, we can all share in that and learn from it.

That's a key reason we decided to make the SamePage online knowledgebase open to all users with the launch of our newest Community edition. Have you heard about it yet? SamePage Community is free and has many (but not all) of the features our customers love in the enterprise edition.

We think this is going to be a really valuable solution for small and mid-sized businesses, students, research groups, small groups within enterprises and others. Many groups like these struggle with some members of leaders not being confident about the benefits of an Enterprise 2.0 solution and all it can do for them. Now, they can try it with no risk at all. There's no time limit for use, so when they love, they can keep growing it and adding more users - expand it's use. And they can upgrade to the enterprise solution with full IT support at any time.

Highlights include:

Ability to scale and grow as the group or organization does
Operates from within the firewall, not from the cloud, providing customer full control of the deployment
The same level of functionality available in the SamePage Enterprise Edition
Ability to upgrade to the fully supported Enterprise Edition at any time
Complete access to the SamePage knowledgebase, where users can discuss issues, bugs and other topics
Free of cost

Our team is really excited about opening up our solution to many different users and groups. Try it! We think you'll like it.

No kidding! Web 2.0 in Grade School

2010-09-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

I was really charmed by this video on Web 2.0 and other technology in schools.

These kids created a video that competed with more than 250 others from across the USA, and they won the $30,000 grand prize in the kindergarten to 5th grade group. The school won a well-deserved technology makeover from eInstruction for this entry.

I'm assuming the teacher wrote the lyrics, but it gets me right in the heart to hear them sing: "All the cool school projects that we do, they go right up on our class wiki."

Wikis + education = SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. And these kids are living proof. They are young, and they seem to get it. And their teacher so clearly understands the value of technology for her teaching, organization and each of those kids' futures.

As they sing, "Web 2.0 is where it's at." Phenomenal.

SamePage News

2010-09-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

We are coming full force out of the summer (the fog and chill-filled summer in the Bay Area). I wanted to share some fun and recent news from SamePage.

First, Dan Gelinas of Security Systems News wrote an article about how our new customer, DICE Corp. is benefiting from SamePage and sharing key advantages with it's own customers. DICE develops large-scale software automation for the security and alarm industries and created DICEWise Wiki as a knowledge management tool. It deployed SamePage to tighten up operations, cut down on wasted paper and postage and deliver up-to-date efficiency to its central station clients while saving time and money.

Cliff Dice, president of DICE Corp. praised the leap forward SamePage provides.

“In the past we moved from having paper for manuals to digital copies on disc. Nowadays, with our software being cloud computing based—anybody can access it through a browser anywhere in the world—the need for training and documentation takes on a new dimension. With cloud-based computing environments, which are deployable anywhere, you have embedded documentation, which takes us to the wiki,” Dice said. “People think of documentation as a living, breathing thing now that they can modify and add to … You want your customers to be able to add to it … If you’re using my product now and you don’t know what a particular field is, you can go click on the arrow and it will deliver the webpage with the wiki embedded. And it builds in the whole knowledgebase.”

Read the rest of the DICE and SamePage article.

In other exciting news, SamePage was voted one of KMWorld's TrendSetting Products of 2010.

"We are pleased to add eTouch SamePage to our list of truly innovative products that are helping to drive the knowledge management market," said Hugh McKellar, editor of KMWORLD. "In our eighth year of awarding trend-setting products, our judging panel assessed even more products than previously. Each product selected demonstrated clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that serve the vendors' full spectrum of constituencies, especially their customers."

All this good news is helping put our team in high gear as we move into the busy Fall. Watch this space for more.

Choosing Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Tools

2010-08-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

I recently read and commented on an article on WebWorkerDaily about "5 Questions to Ask When Choosing Enterprise Collaboration Tools."

The article listed the following as relevant for both large and small organizations, as well as companies of different types:

1- Where will your team be working?
2- Does it offer room for your team to grow?
3- How stable is the company that makes the application?
4- How bleeding edge do you need to be?
5- How does the pricing break down in the long-term?

(Read more in-depth descriptions of the above in the WWD article.)

These are all excellent questions and are vital to the decision-making process. There are many more to add that are important and relevant across industries and company size. I expanded it to a top 10 (not in order of priority) and then added one for good luck.

6. How well can the solution scale to support a larger user base? This is a key element for most companies, unless you are 200% sure you will never, ever grow (kind of a pessimistic viewpoint, don't you think?) Scalability is so important because any investment in a new tool costs the company time and money. You want to be sure you won't have to throw away all that effort when you add 20 employees or 200. A quality collaboration solution will have the ability to grow with the enterprise.

7. How secure is it? Obviously, you have security systems in place enterprise-wide that protect individual PCs and the company network. Collaboration tools often have the options to deploy on-premise (behind your company firewall) or in the cloud, SaaS style (web based). On-premise deployments would have the same security as your other tools and information. You want to be sure all can integrated securely. Plus, many IT people are concerned about security with web-based services. It is important that your collaboration tool provider has considered this and has in place a robust, enterprise-grade security system that prevents unauthorized access to sensitive information.

8. How easy is it for a non-technical user, as many enterprise workers are? Wiki syntax, HTML and so on are great for a behind the scenes discussion of how your collaboration tool works, but they are not the terms you average user needs or wants to be concerned with. WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - is a confusing acronym, but the meaning behind it is what matters. Navigating through a new tool, adding materials and collaborating should be so easy even the least technical employee you have can do it. Confusing systems are barriers to participation, which defeats the very purpose of the collaboration tool purchase.

9. What is the quality and level of support after you purchase? Several other commenters to the WWD article made note of this, and it is a key element. With any collaboration and E2.0 tool, you will have questions and need support. There may be a priced package or some other type of support, but you need to know what you can expect from your solution provider after you sign on the dotted line.

10. How do the features match our objectives? Why are you buying this collaboration tool? What does your company hope to accomplish with it?It’s important to have some understanding of what you hope to accomplish with your tool so that you can match features to tasks. If document management is one of your key objectives, how does the tool organize pages, sections, etc.? Work it out to figure out what you need, otherwise anyone can sell you something you don't.

11. BONUS: Can I play with it before I buy? Look for solutions that aren’t afraid to let you trial for free during the consideration process. This is the best way to determine ease of use and determine whether all your employees - the tech-oriented ones and the non-techies (see #8 above) - can grasp the interface. WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - is a good feature to look for. This is also a good time to see the features in action. Reading about dashboards and WebDAV is one thing, seeing how it actually works is another thing completely and will enable you to get a good feel for what you can expect to see on a daily basis with your own tool.

Are there more considerations integral to the process that I haven't mentioned here? Probably. What are some of yours?

TMCNet.com Interview about SamePage

2010-08-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

My colleague, Venu Shastri, was recently interview by TMCNet.com. Here, he tells Rich Tehrani all about SamePage, key features and how companies can put it to use.

Read more about SamePage version 4.3 at http://etouch.net/company/press_releases.html.

What is WebDav and how can it help you?

2010-07-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

So, as promised, here's more on the latest release of SamePage version 4.3. If you're not technical, you likely won't know the meaning of WebDAV aka Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. Consider it a cool new tech term to show off with to your friends.

What's important is what WebDAV support does for SamePage 4.3 users. Basically, if you want to edit a Word, Excel or Powerpoint file attachment that is located in your wiki, you no longer need to open the attachment, download it to your system, edit, save and then upload to your wiki. What a relief, right?

Now, you can edit attachments without explicitly downloading them. You can get the same "one-click edit and save experience" for files that you are accustomed to with all other wiki pages. The changes you make are saved directly the server.

Aside from saving you some time, energy and effort, this creates a more simple environment for collaboration and document management. Especially for our customers and prospects looking for knowledge management solutions, this is really an important product enhancement.

Watch this SamePage video which talks about this feature. If you're not yet a customer, sign up for a 30-day free SamePage trial.

Love a New Release

2010-07-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

I just love a new software release! I love to be able to tell people about it, play with the new functionalities and all of that. And so I've been patiently waiting until I could rave about...drum roll, please...SamePage version 4.3.

Now it's out and I've got free rein. For starters, I want to talk about the new Explorer view. Basically, navigating SamePage is now as easy and comfortable as working on a Windows-based computer. Users can easily navigate through projects and pages, locate items quickly and manage attachments seamlessly in a familiar user interface.

We have a lot of customers using SamePage as a knowledge management and document management tool, and it's great for that. Now, we can better meet the needs of customers using the enterprise 2.0 solution for knowledge management, including content and document management. With a wiki user interface just like a desktop, KM workers can more simply do their work.

Before we launched the update, I had a stimulating phone conversation with Dan Keldsen, co-founder of consulting firm Information Architected and ranked as one of the Most Influential Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers by SeekOmega.com. Dan is a KM expert and had this to say about our software:

"For KM to succeed today, you need a system that allows the employee to simply do their work, wherever they would normally do it, yet provides them inputs and outputs to make KM as easy as sending an e-mail or saving to their desktop. The aim should be for the simple Active Management of Knowledge, rather than the complete chaos of unmanaged content that so many companies have. If your tools force you into a single way of work, even if it's the 'Wiki Way,' you should consider a more fully integrated solution, such as SamePage 4.3."

If you can't get a feel for this based on my words, this video will help. (If you get an error message in the video below, go to SamPage's YouTube page.

I'll write more soon on the new features and functionalities of SamePage v. 4.3. Can't wait to find out more? Sign up for a free trial or let me know if you have any questions.

E20 Security & Privacy

2010-05-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

A blogger I follow, Elsua.net, recently wrote a post, entitled: How Long Before We Start Taking More Seriously Both Privacy and Security in Enterprise 2.0?

It gave me pause and made me feel a bit disappointed, because I think a few vendors are giving the whole enterprise 2.0 market a bad name. The blog post references a competitor as one of the few companies that takes privacy and security seriously. Maybe the problem is that many Web 2.0 tools are marketing their wares to the enterprise market, but they haven't truly addressed the needs and concerns the enterprise market takes most seriously.

SamePage was designed at the outset to meed the needs of enterprises, and our development team always keeps these needs top of mind. Our software has levels of security at the instance, project and page levels. The security levels can be set for individuals and groups, as well as for different functions -- read, edit and comment.

Security also permeates other areas of SamePage. For example, our search function displays only the result sets to which an individual has access. If there's info in the wiki that you can't access because of security settings, then you won't see that come up in your search results.

We've done this because we've always understood and appreciated the need for enterprises to have secure content, while remaining at the same time mindful of the notion that E2.0 tools are meant to foster better participation.

In fact, I'll take it a step further and invite Luis Suarez of Elsua.net to trial SamePage and check out our privacy and security features for himself.

At the same time, I'm pleased that Luis is asking the hard questions and bring topics to light that will separate the weak from the chaff in the world of enterprise 2.0 software products. He's presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 conference event in mid-June and said:

"I do plan to ask the same questions again that we asked last year on what vendors are finally doing about both privacy and security. They are far too important to be left out, once again, for another year, and I think it is our responsibility, as social software internal evangelists to highlight across the board how critical it is to bring up this subject time and time again, so that, at some point, we may be able to have those issues addressed and sorted out once and for all."

What do you say, Luis?

Blog Love

2010-04-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

If you haven't previously heard of Gil Yehuda or read his enterprise 2.0 blog, well, you're a little too late. Gil, an analyst and rainmaker in the space, has gone in-house with Yahoo! However, as a last hurrah, he wrote a blog post about some of the vendors he likes but hadn't had a chance to blog about. We'd been talking with Gil for a while about SamePage and finally got a little blog love.

Unfortunately, Gil ran out of time to talk with one of our customers. We had a couple of good ones in line. Fortunately, he had only nice things to say, and we appreciate it.

As Gil writes:

"....they [SamePage] don’t make a lot of noise – but they have goods. Their client-base seems to be those very big but shy companies who require top-notch security features (SamePage provides it), but refuse to allow their vendors from sharing their name on a client list."

Gil will be missed as an active contributor to the enterprise 2.0 market.

Wikis in HR

2010-03-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

I recently read an interesting article in Personnel Today that outlined Enterprise 2.0 solutions for the benefit of corporate human resources.

Anyone in the Enterprise 2.0 milieu can instantly imagine the inherent value of wikis and other collaborative solutions for HR departments large and small.

This article, written by Jon Ingham, started with an intro: ´Social media often has a bad name in HR – something to be controlled or banned in the workplace.'

Fortunately, Ingham goes on to provide examples of how social media can actually improve collaboration based on his attendance at Enterprise Social Media conference in London. I’m thrilled to hear that more and more people are ‘getting it.’

I did a search for wikis + human resources and came across a blog - Steve Boese's HR Technology. Steve teaches a graduate course HR technology. Again, am glad to see that academia is joining the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

In 2008, Steve had given his students an assignment to create a wiki for the fictitious company he’d created for them. He wrote the work he received “hammered home the point for me that HR staffs, no matter how small, or seemingly technologically unprepared, can effectively utilize Wiki for numerous purposes. My students built the foundation for a decent small company intranet in about 6 weeks -- with no prior experience, all in their free time.”

I’m left thinking…hooray! When these grad students enter the workforce or expand their roles in the workforce, they will have a tremendous leg up on others.

They are a number of clear benefits of wikis to HR departments. First off, just think about what happens to individuals’ knowledge and information when they leave the company. It doesn’t matter if someone’s been fired or retires. In many companies, when someone leaves the company, valuable knowledge gets lost and isn’t often recovered.

Why? Because “email is where knowledge goes to die.” (from:http://twitter.com/bfrench)

Wikis keep data out of the email hole.

Ingham reported that Virgin Media, Santander, Axa, Asda and Pfizer are all using social media to engage and connect their employees. He writes: “For Helen Farrar, head of internal communications at Virgin Media, one of the main benefits of social media is moving "water cooler conversations" into the public arena. This helps the company engage its people in "an entirely different way" as well as gaining a good understanding of what people are thinking and feeling.”

Wikis are also tremendously beneficial for HR as a central repository for policies, procedures, documentation and employee communication. Internal newsletters can be a thing of the past – companies can post all relevant news and information to the wiki and push it to everyone. Letter from the president? Post it to the wiki, or put more stylishly -- Wikify it!

Plus, wikis can help put a face to a name – particularly useful for large, global companies or those with multiple offices where staffers don’t always get a chance to meet their colleagues.

Let's hope more HR people and others embrace the idea of wikis in HR!

Anonymous, But No Less Important

2010-03-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

It seems I have been remiss about blogging recently. It’s not that it hasn’t been on my mind; it’s that I’ve been very busy, which is a very, very good thing.

I am proud to report that after setting a personal goal to get more customer feedback in 2010, I have accomplished it. We’ve just completed a customer case study with a US-based, publicly traded global brokerage and financial markets technology company that has been a SamePage customer since 2007.

It’s anonymous. That is, we can’t attach a company name to it. Unfortunately, that’s a common story in the world of software vendors. Customers may be pleased as punch with your solution. But if they publicly comment on that, they’ll have every vendor knocking down their door. So the high-profile customers often have no-comment policies.

So, we agreed to settle on an anonymous case study. And when we heard about how useful SamePage has been to this company, we’re thrilled we did. Because even though none of you know which company it is, we do. And there’s tremendous satisfaction knowing that this large, successful corporation is so happy with our solution. We’re busting at the seams to let you in on our little secret. But alas, we can’t.

The company’s manager of global development infrastructure proclaims that many people use the wiki every day and it is “extremely key to almost all of our development projects. We use it for collaboration on a daily basis.”

“We have lots of separate projects,” the manager added. “So we need what we think of as separate wikis. We have about 145 project wikis – not all of them are active, but they are so easy to create. SamePage really understood that need and offers great separation of projects. In our development process, project ‘owners’ set up wikis for individual projects or products.”

“We’d be lost without it,” he said.

Will you take a few minutes to read the case study? Read the rest: SamePage Financial-Technology Customer Case Study

New Year, Old Thank Yous

2010-01-18T13:23:00.000-08:00

We've hit the ground running in 2010. There's good energy, excitement...a buzz in the air.

I always become reflective when we turn the page in the calendar to a new year. The other day, I started thinking about SamePage customers and how I always like to hear about how and why they're using our software. I want to know all about what their teams are able to accomplish with their online collaboration and knowledge management. It's not everyday that I hear about how our customers are using the enterprise wiki and what kind of specific successes they are having. But some SamePage customers have provided feedback to us in the past, including these below, and I thank them for it. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

"SamePage allows us to securely and efficiently share and discuss project information with our collaborators located across the US."

- Stan Burgos, Graduate Researcher, Caltech

"I can't imagine we could have made a better choice. This one did not take us a lot of effort to start up and work with. It's very well done; and works very well for us. We didn't do any training, but everybody can jump in and use the product with zero start-up time. It's that intuitive."

- Kevin Morningstar, Executive Director, SAITS, Cal Poly Pomona
Read a full case study about Cal Poly Pomona.

"We have been looking for an enterprise solution in the market to fulfill the collaboration requirements of our customer. SamePage met the criterion set by our client, i.e. to allow users gain access to information, resources, and enable them to collaborate, generate and share ideas and knowledge. SamePage's ease-of-use, intuitive interface and the WYSIWYG editing feature for the blog and wiki enabled user collaboration and ensured perpetual retention and extension of knowledge and experiences within the client's organization. The robust solution also allowed ease of deployment in a complex and high availability clustered infrastructure. Our working relationship with eTouch has been very good and the technical support is responsive and helpful in our journey in deploying SamePage for our client."

-Pee Yee Koo, Project Manager, Siemens

SamePage scores another touchdown!

2010-01-11T12:47:00.000-08:00

Ovum recently published an enterprise 2.0 report, and it includes eTouch SamePage as a leading vendor. The report, entitled “Enterprise Collaboration 2.0: Connecting with the Global Opportunity” identifies the trends and market opportunities of enterprise collaboration and outlines some positive ideas for the future of the market. The best part - SamePage is included as a 'top specialist vendor.'

In the report summary, analyst Rhonda Ascierto writes:

“The market opportunity for enterprise collaboration is relatively immature within the broader spectrum of enterprise software. Despite factors that are inhibiting its adoption, the widespread use of enterprise collaboration seems inevitable and the potential upside for end-user organizations and vendors is substantial.”

The report also analyzes the market drivers and inhibitors that are driving demand for Enterprise Collaboration 2.0; details the future technology evolution of the enterprise collaboration and includes analysis of how software delivery models are shaping the market; and outlines go-to-market strategies of enterprise collaboration vendors.

You can read the full summary report at Datamonitor.com.

Year in Review

2009-12-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

Just the other day, I was in a meeting with eTouch CEO Ani Gadre and some other teammates. We were talking about what a challenging year it's been in many ways, but how much the wiki and enterprise 2.0 industries have grown - new companies, products and game-changing ideas. Even amidst the global crises, incredible things and innovation have happened.

Ani gave me some of his thoughts. You can read the rest on his eTouch blog.

"The term 'enterprise 2.0' has become more widely used and accepted as a valuable business tool. Today, enterprise 2.0 is about companies truly encouraging and foster collaborative environments, whether through integrative wikis or Twitter-like tools for the workplace or even giving remote workers better access to corporate intranets."

"I remain quite optimistic about the business outlook for 2010," he added. "There are companies in a variety of industries starting out with enterprise 2.0 projects or deployments. We will continue to offer them services that meet their needs and product features that help them stay ahead of the game."
"We're excited about the potential for SamePage in the new year."

I will certainly raise a glass and make a New Year's toast to that.

Wishing everyone a joyous holiday season and a new year full of happiness, good health and success.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Musings

2009-11-11T14:35:00.000-08:00

My company, eTouch SamePage, opted out of exhibiting this year at Enterprise 2.0 Conference San Francisco. I did, however, take to the Moscone Center and check out the event. After a day there attending only the keynotes and walking around the expo hall -- no, I didn't spring for a full conference pass, so I missed the smaller, more targeted discussions -- I can honestly say that I don't regret not exhibiting this year.

That's not to say the event was bad. It wasn't. Good things will always come out of getting industry thought leaders in one place at one time. There were interesting discussions scheduled as breakout sessions and some of the keynotes and panels, particularly the Andrew McAfee-led Booz Allen Hamilton case study, was in-depth for a general panel and offered good insight into corporate thinking.

But in walking the expo floor and milling about in the hall, I didn't feel any great energy or excitement. The expo floor, even combined with VoiceCon, was small without any tremendous standouts. Clearly, that's dictated primarily by the current economic climate - vendors just don't have the extra cash these days to exhibit. Or, if they do exhibit, it's pretty barebones. What I'm talking about is just excitement, a buzz in the air that you often feel at events like this. It comes from entrepreneurs with great ideas and potential clients itching to learn more with journalists and analysts trying to get as many details as possible. Walking around the conference, I didn't feel it.

I've been reading tons of post-even wrap-ups by journalists, bloggers, etc. I'm not the only one with this opinion; although some say there's a rationale for it. Tony Byrne of CMS Watch writes:

"My first observation is that the conference vibe was much more practical, and much less like a religious revival meeting than previous Enterprise 2.0 events. Some gurus complained about a lack of passion and energy, but I think Andrew McAfee set a great tone in his keynote when he exhorted the audience to replace liberation theology with more realistic goals."

Oliver Marks wrote about his post-conference thoughts and posted a video of a discussion between him and McAfee.

I know there's a lot more coverage out there, and I look forward to reading more. Perhaps that's where the excitement will come....after everyone's thoughts have had a chance to simmer, and conversation follow-up moves into high gear as new relationships flourish. There was a lot of brainpower and entrepreneurship in the Moscone Center for those few days, obviously. And I am very excited to see what happens as the discussions continue.

What did you think of Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco?

Follow our discussion on Twitter at @samepagewiki.

What's Fun Got To Do With It?

2009-10-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

If someone told me piano stairs or flooring of any kind could be funny outside of the 1988 movie "Big" starring Tom Hanks, I'd be surprised. But Volkswagon caught people's attention with its piano stairs viral campaign.

I only relate this to enterprise 2.0 because the video was mentioned in a recent blog post, "Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation" by Rex Lee. He highlights:

"Fun, as a design principle shouldn't be overlooked as it impacts the application design from look and feel, through context, content and process. It also should be addressed when designing events leveraging social computing technologies."

Clearly, Volkswagon is taking a fun approach to impact people and communicate its message. I wonder how many other companies actually practice that kind of approach?

It seems that fun is more often reserved for business-to-consumer type businesses - and then, often only those with big budgets AND you're not really sure how much fun they're having. But I don't notice as many FUN approaches in B2B environments. Perhaps fun doesn't equal serious in many minds and serious is key.

Consultant and writer Bill Ives chimed in with his own post and reports that he's had success integrating this (gasp!) fun concept:

"I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign. This approach succeeds even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues."

Wikis and some other other enterprise 2.0 solutions are easy to make fun because they involve collaboration and focus on fostering creativity. So fun can be brought in at the employee-relations level or with external audiences.

"The power of fun is often forgotten," opines Rex. Hear, hear!

Have you ever focused on making sure that fun is part of a KM or other type of campaign? Tell me about it.

Death Sounds So Final

2009-10-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

There are regular blog posts, tweets and discussions about the purported 'death of email.' Talk of 'death' is a lot more morbid and frightening than saying 'decrease' or 'dwindle' or some other much less dramatic word. Ooooh, beware the decrease of emails. Nope, doesn't do a thing. You?

In a recent post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog, Stowe Boyd wonders what dead means, exactly, when we talk about the death of email?

According to Boyd, he first talked about the death of email in 2004-2005 and was nearly 'tarred and feathered.' Still, today he sticks with his original hypothesis that email will slowly, but surely disappear. He writes:

"In time, it will fall off the edge, like fax is now that we can scan and send attachments more easily than using dedicated fax machines. We will find that email will be left with a short list of uses, like monthly mailing from the bank, or travel intineraries from Expedia. These relative impersonal communications with companies will be the final resting ground for email, and then, even that will wink out when a better metaphor for social interaction with companies becomes dominant. And I doubt that we will miss it when it’s gone, either."

Boyd refers to a recent article by Jessica Vascellaro article in The Wall Street Journal that begins, "Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.. "

As new tools develop for the enterprise, perhaps it will become more easy for the average, non-social-media saavy user to find ways to communicate electronically that aren't email. Then it will become more accepted -- as the fax machine did. Most of these 'replacement' tools are so new, it will be a while before we see what sticks. And there are so many new tools, it can be overwhelming for people.

When our team here at SamePage is thinking about wiki enhancements, we take into consideration the needs of all types of workers - those email-reliant included. We look for ways to better connect the dots for email users to newer technologies, like a wiki. We strive to keep it simple with features that more easily integrate email and the wiki so the central repository can be built up and real conversations can happen.

Jessica inserts a bit of editorial at the tail end of her article. She writes:

"But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person."

But in-person vs. electronic communications? Well, that's just a whole 'nother bag of worms.

Laughing at Misconceptions

2009-09-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

Misconceptions abound in every industry, but we have to be able to laugh at ourselves, right? I saw this cartoon on Content Management Connection. In the blogger circle, the cartoon is actually courtesy of Geek and Poke and was inspired by Dion Hinchcliffe's article "14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail."

Do some people position enterprise 2.0 as the panacea for all enterprise ills? Well, not really. But certainly that's how some evangelism is perceived. And yes, there are enterprise 2.0 failures alongside of tremendous success stories. We have to try to understand perceptions and be realistic in our evangelism to help create realistic expectations about what enterprise 2.0 applications and software can help companies to accomplish. Because they are just tools; tools that are only as strong as the people who use them. As Dion Hinchiffe writes: "....this seems to mean Enterprise 2.0 projects are more likely to fail due to seeming larger than usual lack of alignment and organizational backing."

If companies expect to launch an application or software that will magically cure all their collaboration and knowledge management challenges, well then...Abracadabra!

"A Wiki Wonderland"

2009-09-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

"A Wiki Wonderland." That was the headline to the KMWorld article about the launch of SamePage version 4.2. You gotta love that....at least I did.

What makes it a wonderland? Several valuable features and enhancements to the product that will truly benefit enterprises of all sizes. Interested? Let me tell you more.

The features we've added will better meet the needs of a remote and social-media friendly knowledge management workforce, including business travelers and wiki administrators.

Changes to this version include:

- Dynamic portal-like dashboard with drag and drop widgets that can be personalized at company and individual levels, eliminating the need for a separate intranet portal product.
- Advanced email integration that enables remote workers to more easily 'wikify' content from any smartphone.
- A wide selection of new and enhanced plug-ins that can be customized for each enterprise, including tag cloud and project member plug-ins, among others.
- More detailed analytics, usage and content reports for administrators.
- Ratings on Blog posts and more blog analytics.
- Support for Microsoft Office 2007
- WYSIWYG enhancements to further simplify the user interface.
- Increased privileges for the system user or administrator to manage pages and projects.

Intrigued or interested about being a part of our "wiki wonderland?" You can start by signing up for a free 30-day trial from etouch.net, direct message (DM) us on Twitter @samepagewiki or email us at sales@etouch.net.

Lucky Number 8

2009-08-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

I’m a big fan of Stewart Mader’s blog. He offers strong insights and keeps a steady flow of dialogue and new information coming to his readers. Recently, he wrote ‘8 Things You Can Do With an Enterprise Wiki,’ and I see it was picked up by other bloggers, tweeted and so on. Actually, he wrote it for Digital Landfill, and it was initially published there.

Clearly, there are a lot of things a company can use a wiki for. It varies widely, depending on what kind of work the company does and what it’s goals are for instituting a wiki. But Stewart takes a general approach that can apply to ANY company in ANY industry. I think that’s why this post has had such wide appeal.

Stewart’s 8 ways:
1- Meeting agendas
2- Meeting minutes and action items
3- Project management
4- Gather input
5- Build documentation
6- Assemble and reuse information
7- Employee handbook
8- Knowledge base (the one key external wiki benefit mentioned)

“Let’s look at eight ways a wiki can help you readjust your valuable time to get more of your essential work done, spend less time on meetings and redundant activities, and more efficiently assemble, refine and reuse valuable information,” he writes. That pretty well sums up the overarching theme here – that enterprise wikis save time, reduce redundancies and create more effective way to funnel information through team members or the company as a whole.

You know you hate it when you email a draft presentation or document to multiple people and then have to marry all the edits that come in at various times on different versions, don’t you? With wikis, that becomes a thing of the past. And no one likes it when they have to search their hard drives for all the relevant files for a new employee because there’s no central repository.

“As the wiki is used to build and maintain project proposals, documents, and other reusable pieces of information, the process of creating future versions becomes easier,” writes Stewart. “An organization’s wiki is an ideal place to provide general-use information to an internal audience.”

He doesn’t get much into the creative and collaborative benefits of enterprise wikis, but for someone who’s becoming educated about enterprise 2.0, this is a great and quick read. It helps put things into perspective.

Don't forget to follow @samepagewiki on Twitter.

Don't Ignore Email Vulnerabilites; There's a Better Way

2009-08-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

42% of Best-in-Class companies reduced lost productivity attibutable to email by more than 20%

42% of Best-in-Class companies reduced help-desk time and the cost to remediate email related infections by more than 20%

65% of Best-in-Class companies reduced the volume of spam reaching user inboxes by more than 20%

These stats are courtesy of a June 2009 Aberdeen Group report on safe email. The focus of the report was to highlight the strategies best-in-class companies put in place in order to create an effective email security strategy, but I think there’s a lot more here if we just look a little deeper.

The report supports many of the ideas put forward by enterprise 2.0 companies about the many ways in which email is failing companies. That’s not to say email doesn’t have it’s valuable place in business. It does. But it can no longer be the end all, be all for business communications.

In the report, Analyst Carol Baroudi writes: “Well-financed email threat creators persist in propagating ever more sophisticated and potentially lethal attacks through the estimated 62 trillion spam messages sent last year……Add the rising value of sensitive data in a desperate market, and we have a set of trends that all point to critical reasons organizations cannot ignore their email vulnerabilities.”

Enterprise wikis are a valuable tool for businesses collaboration and knowledge management needs. A deployed wiki should have enterprise-grade security features that protect all of its information. When choosing a wiki to deploy, this is a tremendous benefit of deployed or SaaS products versus open source. Certainly, enterprise wikis can offer a safer environment for internal collaboration and sharing.

A Success Story at Cal Poly Pomona

2009-08-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

“With Word, the documents were not very searchable, and we had limited ability to share these documents at the same time. We tried to use a CMS system to create internal web pages, but it wasn’t set up to manage dynamic pages with multiple contributors at multiple times. It was unwieldy and simply not friendly for collaboration.”

This is a direct quote from a wiki user and probably has more weight than when I toot my company's horn about strengths of wikis over word and CMS systems.

I promise I didn’t make it up. Kevin Morningstar, executive director of Student Affairs Information & Technology Services (SAITS) within the Division of Student Affairs at California State Polytechnic University Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), said it.

There’s a new case study on the SAITS experiences and successes to-date with SamePage. In it, Kevin explains how, for the first few years of its operation, SAITS was charged with (and employees struggled with) finding ways to create and share effective user and technical documentation. They tried and discarded other solutions before determining a wiki was the best fit.

Kevin explains that when his team found SamePage: “We jumped on it. SamePage came pre-packaged; it was already executable to be immediately up and running,” he noted. “And we had it up and running in 24 hours with one staff member taking care of the set up.”

“I can’t imagine we could have made a better choice,” he said. Read the rest of the case study.

A Wiki for SMBs

2009-07-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

Back in March, James Gaskin published an article in Network World in which he profiled a small business' successful use of SamePage enterprise wiki.

In the article, Gaskin quotes Armen Grigorian, a manager at Defoe Fournier and Company, and writes:

“We needed a way for people to collaborate on projects. All our projects have at least six people involved." In a company of a dozen people, half the employees work together on each project. The problem is, those employees are scattered around, between headquarters in New York City, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and even Armenia. Grigorian continues with a description that sounds like most small businesses. “There's no real IT department or money to develop a custom application. We rely on typical tools for small businesses, like Excel and Word from Microsoft. We're all finance and accounting people who can just barely use a computer.”

Now, it's even easier for small and mid-sized businesses to get started with SamePage. Last week, we announced that SamePage is now available on MYSMBStore.com, which is a one-stop shop, or marketplace of name brand, on-demand SaaS applications for everything an SMB needs to start or manage their business. It's a Renovatix Solutions' site.

“Online social and professional collaboration of open source content has quickly become the de-facto method for idea exchange,” said J. Scott Robinson, general manager, Renovatix Solutions. “We’re very pleased to work with eTouch to add SamePage to our suite of applications to provide SMBs everywhere a very efficient tool to collaborate with their teams and customers.”

Visitors to MYSMBStore.com can register for a free trial of SamePage. Purchasing options start at $100 per month for up to 20 users. Know someone who runs, owns or does IT for an SMB? Send them to mySMBstore.com!

Enterprise 2.0 turns 3

2009-07-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

Did you know the term Enterprise 2.0 was first coined in 2006 by Andrew McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School? He published an article in MIT's Sloan Management Review on April 1, but it was no joke. And it helped to formulate a movement behind the technologies driving the market.

Andrew is prolific on the topic of enterprise 2.0. He's active on Twitter, his blog and speaks at many events. C.G. Lynch with IDG News Service published an interview with Andrew in which Lynch asked questions about what's next for the market.

Andrew said he sees all types of engagements of enterprise 2.0 technologies.

"I definitely get the strong impression that the use of these Enterprise 2.0 tools within companies for business purposes is accelerating instead of decelerating. One of the really heartening things is that this isn't just a phenomenon for high-tech companies, or companies that employ tons of Gen Y workers. It's happening at different kinds of companies, industries and sectors of the economy."

Read the rest of the article. Also, Andrew has a new book coming out soon, entitled: Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization's Toughest Challenges.

What do you think is next for enterprise 2.0?

Follow us on Twitter: @samepagewiki

Gil Yehuda's Got it Right

2009-06-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

Why wikis should be a standard workplace tool, writes Gil Yehuda in a recent blog post. No question mark; this is a statement of fact. Right on, Gil!

A former Forrester analyst who covered the Enterprise 2.0 space, Gil discovered intranet wikis in late 2002. In this blog post, he writes a strong, detailed argument about the value of wikis to companies. He cites a study he participated in while at Forrester and explains that, in the Enterprise 2.0 sphere, wikis "were the lead dog in the race." He writes:

"My conclusions from years of managing and implementing wikis, as well as peer-reviewed published research that I conducted, tells me that wikis are the strong play of Enterprise 2.0. Put it together with a profile capability (the foundation of social networking tools), and you are armed to start reshaping the intranet. Of course, it’s never the weapon that wins the war, but you want to make sure you have the right gear."

An important takeaway here is that wikis and blogs and other Enterprise 2.0 tools won't instantaneously transform your business (though you will accrue gains faster than most, if not all other, software tools). These tools equip you to better handle the flow of information and develop an environment that fosters collaboration and creativity in a secure location. A wiki is only as good as the people who use it and the information that goes into it. But when someone who researches and studies these kinds of things declares: Wikis should be a standard workplace tool, I'd sure as heck listen.

Are you following SamePage on Twitter yet? @samepagewiki

A World of Wikis

2009-05-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

Late last week, I was putting the finishing touches on speaking proposals for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC and was brainstorming ideas around 'the world is a wiki.' And then I read about Frost & Sullivan's new report, and I realized 'the world wants a wiki!'

Frost & Sullivan recently published Web 2.0 Technologies in the Recession-hit Europe as a Solution for Small and Medium Businesses.

Research Analyst Iwona Petruczynik said: "In Europe, there is a common misconception that a true deliverable is measured in how many kilograms of paper one produces and hands over to a client. This belief is hindering the adoption of Web 2.0 solutions, as more end products are being delivered in the form of a wiki or a blog."

However, businesses are seeking new ways to stay productive while significantly cutting costs with the help of Web 2.0 solutions, according to the press release. "From lower-cost versions of enterprise applications, to utilising cloud computing, 'crowd sourcing' business owners are taking advantage of what Web 2.0 has to offer."

As they well should.

It's a cry being heard 'round the world: we're cutting back, but be more productive. Yikes! A scary proposition. But that's the magic of innovative technological solutions. They remedy the problem.

Petruczynik explains: "Web 2.0 solutions may be part of the cure for the recessionary headache that many European businesses are now experiencing; social networking sites, wikis, and blogs are just some of the more well-known examples of Web 2.0 technologies that can play an important role here. These solutions are becoming more prevalent in the European small and medium businesses (SMBs) arena, especially at a time like this, when workers are being forced to do more with less."

I echo that thought without reservation.

Built for Collaboration; Ready to Work

2009-05-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

Armen Grigorian, a manager at Defoe Fournier and Company, merchant bankers since 1824, have used a wiki for more than two years, and Grigorian loves it.

“We needed a way for people to collaborate on projects. All our projects have at least six people involved,” said Grigorian. In a company of a dozen people, half the employees work together on each project. The problem is, those employees are scattered around, between headquarters in New York City, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and even Armenia.

Grigorian continues with a description that sounds like most small businesses. “There's no real IT department or money to develop a custom application. We rely on typical tools for small businesses, like Excel and Word from Microsoft. We're all finance and accounting people who can just barely use a computer.”

Defoe Fournier needs to keep all their working documents per project in a central place where everyone can get to them from anywhere, securely. SamePage makes it easy for Grigorian and his coworkers to organize their documents per project, keep track of documents as they change, and store files for finished projects so they're out of the way yet still easily accessible.

“When we start a new project, I assign someone to start it, and I allocate the jobs and access to the project files,” said Grigorian. “We have pages for each project with discussions and notes. Sometimes we have live discussions by invitation, or people can comment later.”

______________________________________________________
Excerpted from a Network World article written by James Gaskin. Read the rest at: http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2009/030909gaskin.html

Don't fear the wiki

2009-05-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

Wiki consultant Stewart Mader posted on his blog last week about an issue that seems so simple, yet one that becomes a major hindrance to wikis not taking off within a corproate environment: FEAR.

Fear can motivate or disable you. However, Stewart suggests ways to turn around someone's fear of contributing to a wiki. In fact, he says, contributing to a wiki can solidfy your value to an organization.

Once again, Stewart takes a very real issue and provides a simple answer.

"The more a person shares on the wiki, the more their value is known to the company," Stewart says. He adds that, of course, it's natural to be afraid of sharing your knowledge. But he explains that when people start to 'give away' or share what they know, their value to the company will be greater, and they will create more time to work on even more things, thereby expanding their knowledge base even further. So simple, yet so true.

You can't assume that your bosses know how much you know. And you can't keep all your knowledge (no matter how hard earned) to yourself, so that anyone in the company who wants to learn about 'your' topic needs to go to you. It's to YOUR ADVANTAGE to share. Your bosses will see for themselves when looking in the wiki how much you know, and your colleagues can search in your wiki pages for answers to their questions. this will put you in a better light with your bosses and free up your time to expand your base and grow within the organization. It's a win for the company and a win for you.

Don't fear the wiki. Take the leap.

Getting Started with Wikis?

2009-04-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

I was recently interviewed for an Outlook Series, and I had the opportunity to discuss the background of wikis, as well as ways enterprise wikis can drive business productivity.

Take a listen. Then, let me know what you think.

Salesforce + Wiki = Better Salesforce

2009-04-20T18:17:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed that there are no enterprise wikis on the Salesforce AppExchange?! That is, there weren't, until last week. But to me, it seems like a perfect match. And now, SamePage is part of the Force.com AppExchange on Salesforce.com.

Here are some things Salesforce CRM customers can do with a SamePage application:
- Collaborate and share knowledge and information online with customers, leads and prospects
- Easily import leads and contacts from Salesforce into the enterprise wiki
- Involve business associates in the collaboration process
- Use a ‘single sign on’ mechanism – users that log into Salesforce are seamlessly transported into their SamePage wiki
- Benefit from wiki, blog, forum, discussion board bundle by having a centralized destination for all Enterprise 2.0 collaborative activity

“The Force.com AppExchange offers an abundance of cloud computing applications that complement and expand the value of Salesforce CRM,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer at salesforce.com. “Customers can use eTouch SamePage as a cost-effective and innovative enterprise wiki product that facilitates knowledge management and collaboration with both internal and external audiences.”

Social Media is Good for Business

2009-04-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

People who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not, according to a recent University of Melbourne study that I read about on ReadWriteWeb.

According to the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in Workplace Internet leisure browsing (WILB) a term coined by study author Dr. Brent Coker.

People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr. Coker. It helps to sharpen workers' concentration

Lest anyone think the study is suggesting a lot of internet surfing at work, the survey did report the obvious. Coker said those who behave with Internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without.

Is this useless information? Or should companies take some of it to heart?

There are plenty of companies out there that block employees’ access to Facebook, MySpace and other social sites. Certainly, unblocking these sites is not going to solve productivity issues.

However, as more companies integrate enterprise 2.0 and social media solutions into the workplace, it may behoove them to bear these study results in mind. Certain tools, such as enterprise wikis for online collaboration and knowledge management, can allow employees to incorporate a bit of their personality and self-expression within the confines of a ‘corporate’ environment. So during their WILB time, employees can interact online with colleagues, share news and information, and give their brains a little rest before they start working again more productively.

More and more enterprise tools are incorporating social-media elements. Maybe these engineers have known this whole time!

Hear the full audio interview or watch an interview with Dr. Brent Coker.

A GOOD Kind of Socializing at Word

2009-03-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

Web sites, tech magazines, even mainstream papers are all writing about social media xyz. To say it's a hot topic is a great understatement. For example, the landscape of blogging has expanded, and the discourse in the comments can often be as valuable as the original blog post. Also, Facebook, Twitter and similar sites are becoming more valuable to companies, as people realize how to maximize their use for business purposes.

All of these 'social' tools help create a more comfortable online discussion; they help to make things more friendly and personal. That makes people feel they have more at stake. And I think that's a key reason why social features are increasingly finding their place in enterprise tools.

Last week, we announced the release of SamePage version 4.1 that incorporates social elements and allows users to personalize their wiki experience and profiles. SamePage is an enterprise wiki, yes. Adding social elements can help to foster better, more comfortable relationships among colleagues.

Some of the social features of SamePage version 4.1 are:

An integrated social directory with rich user profiles and people search that facilitates people-centric collaboration.
User-created profiles to provide a well-rounded view to other users and become a source for a collaborative social directory.
People search functionality.
Page ratings
Twitter-like status updates, e.g. What are you doing now?
Display of the most recent wiki activities
On-premise customers can also customize the user-profile for their instance, hiding SamePage attributes that may not be relevant within their specific organization.

You can read more about it: http://www.etouch.net/products/collaboration/features_social_directory.html.
Or try it free for 30 days.

It's THE wave of the future.

Changing Traditional Deployment Models to Meet Customer Needs

2009-02-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

When the business climate changes, customers (both current and potential) are looking for new and better options. Software providers need to be responsive; think outside of the box of typical client packages.

Take multi-tenancy, for instance. As many already know, a multi-tenant solution is utilized by multiple groups of people but is based on a single, shared infrastructure. An application is built to partition each group's data so that it is private, while operating on a shared system. It is a typical deployment model for software as a service (SaaS) customers. It means the software provider hosts the product, and customers access an external server to use it. The customer doesn’t need the infrastructure; IT support is provided by the software company.

To meet customer needs and to be responsive to financial concerns of potential customers, the SamePage team has developed a new and evolutionary deployment model. This week, we announced that SamePage will now offer multi-tenancy for on-premise enterprise customers. It will be most beneficial to large enterprises, umbrella organizations and educational institutions.

With a SamePage multi-tenancy, on-premise deployment, customers will be able to develop customized wikis for each of their clients and track usage and activity. They will have increased flexibility and efficiency with horizontal scaling of the wiki within their organization.

At the same time, we’ve minimized the needs of IT management by centralizing and streamlining everything into one wiki instance for a company.

The bottom line is that consolidation of wiki services into a single, centrally managed infrastructure can translate to significant cost savings. Hardware, network and IT overheads can be dramatically reduced.

It’s out of the ‘box’ of typical software delivery mechanisms, but unique times call for innovative measures.

Read more about the features: http://www.etouch.net/products/collaboration/features_multi_tenancy.html

The Recession-Ready Wiki

2009-01-29T13:07:00.000-08:00

Last week, I co-hosted a webinar with Aberdeen. The title of the presentation was: The Recession-Ready Wiki: Surviving the Economic Storm through Sales Collaboration and Knowledge Management. It is now available as a replay link on the eTouch site.

At its base form, it was a discussion about how Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and knowledge management tools can benefit sales organizations in selling more effectively in these challenging times. The statistics and findings presented by Alex Jefferies, senior research associate at Aberdeen Group, were pulled from two recent reports he published – Sales 2.0: Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration published September 2008, and Sales Intelligence: The Secret to Sales Nirvana, which he will publish at the end of January.

Alex says: “The recent challenges in the economic landscape have necessitated the urgent search for tools that immediately and effectively deliver a positive return on investments. Enterprise 2.0 tools present an evolutionary approach to improve the efficiency of processes and productivity of your workforce in these times.”

In his presentation, Alex pointed out that in these difficult economic times, there’s an increased need for better and more accessible sales intelligence and that companies can stay ahead by worker smarter, not necessarily harder. These are two driving forces behind the movement towards the use of wikis in the enterprise.

He also spent some time talking about what the best-in-class, or most successful companies in their fields, are doing and how they’re differentiating themselves in the market. More often than not, this includes embracing new technologies like enterprise wikis to push forward.

The webinar provides a lot of useful information, and I recommend you listen to it. You can also download the Sales 2.0 report. It’s worth the time. And if you have any questions about it, contact me.

Here's to 2009

2009-01-15T17:57:00.000-08:00

The holiday season has quickly passed us by. It never seems to go on long enough, does it? The weather has been crazy, the economy is in flux; yet people took time out to appreciate family, friends and enjoy themselves. That's what I love about the holidays.

Now it's back to the grind. And there's much to be optimistic about -- a new year and new beginnings. But let me focus on business.

The Enterprise 2.0 marketplace is burgeoning. Early adopters are realizing returns on their investments, and more companies are catching on to the potential of wikis and other software solutions for collaboration and knowledge management challenges. Think these types of solutions aren't going mainstream? Charlie Rose of PBS aired an interview last week with Léo Apotheker, co-CEO and a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, and Andrew Mcafee of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School about enterprise software. I read about it first on Stewart Mader's blog.

The interview stressed about enterprise software solutions can help corporations manage fragmented technology systems, departments to better manage the company and lead the company to greater success. Oliver Marks of ZDnet also wrote about the interview. He wrote: "This TV appearance is a fascinating indication of how much more seriously Enterprise 2.0 is being taken in the current economic predicament." It's a really interesting interview and something we've been talking about recently as well. It's definitely worth a watch.

2009 has the potential to be a defining year for social software - a year in which wikis, blogs, and plugins, etc. will become part of mainstream technology conversations. And, it brings with it the promise of solving collaboration woes across industries.

I'll toast to that.

Wikis and Intel

2008-12-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

In business, it's important to align your company with strong partners. It provides added credibility, street cred and benefits. In the case of my enterprise wiki software, eTouch SamePage, we're now a part of the Intel® Software Partner Program.

Through its partner program, Intel offers tools, resources, technology and expertise to help drive top line growth; and by assisting partners from both the technology and marketing angles. From a technology standpoint, it enables a partner to get a better understanding of roadmaps and Intel’s view of the future. From a business perspective, it enables tons of Intel partners to discover and find solutions for their business needs – thereby providing valuable mindshare and exposure.

For these reasons, we believe Intel's technology solutions can further enhance our dynamic enterprise wiki product and help us accomplish goals in a timely manner. This will help to improve our competitive advantage. Plus, Intel is highly respected brand in the tech and business worlds, and we're proud to be associated with the company.

Wikis continue to charm and delight corporations worldwide with their intuitive, friendly, yet powerful approach to solving collaboration aches. SamePage’s partnership with Intel is yet another step towards realizing its potential in this exciting marketplace.

Wikis in Academia, Part II

2008-12-03T17:23:00.000-08:00

I've posted before about wikis in academia. It's a very important area of potential growth for many wiki companies. At the same time, I'm sure it's a challenge for educational institutions to make investments in software; budgets everywhere are tight.

Even with upfront software-investment costs, I believe wikis are a technology that quickly earn their keep. The investment pays off in the value of the shared knowledge and collaboration.

Today, eTouch SamePage announced it has been selected by the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Atwater Research Group to integrate the wiki for the group’s internal communications. The prestigious research group will use the SamePage enterprise wiki for several purposes, including project collaboration, posting manuals and procedures for lab equipment and research processes, as well as to update, comment and edit information in real time for the lab group of nearly 50 members.

“We selected SamePage because of the ease of setup, use and maintenance,” said Davis Darvish, a Caltech PhD Graduate Student and member of the Atwater Research Group. “It provides excellent features that keep our information secure and only accessible to those who are authorized. Several members of our research group have used SamePage on other projects, and we had received a number of strong recommendations about the enterprise wiki before making our final decision. Plus, it was one of the best-priced hosted full-service wikis we found.”

The members of the Atwater Research Group are obviously bright; they are engaged in interdisciplinary materials and device research, spanning photonics and electronics and with applications in Si-based photonics, plasmonics, renewable energy and mechanically active thin film devices. And so we are proud they selected SamePage among all the wiki and collaboration-software options out there.

In addition, a couple of months ago, Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles announced it was integrating SamePage product for use by the university's IT department, as well as other divisions, for collaboration, knowledge management and long-range planning within its IT department, the backbone for the university's systems. Specifically, LMU will use SamePage to collaborate on multiple campus projects, including the development of new student and faculty-oriented learning spaces in the university library. In addition, academic technology analysts will collaborate on research with faculty in various schools.

It's quite clear that the potential for wiki use within an academic institution is large and varied. And the uptick will continue as more realize its benefits.

Wikis: A Sign O’ The Times

2008-11-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

In difficult economic times, companies struggle so many details, such as travel costs, productivity and increasing opportunity costs, just to name a few. The typical initial reaction is to tighten the purse strings, clamp down on spending, stop most business travel and curb expenses. For many, this can bring some elements of operation to a standstill.

On the flip side of that coin is the opportunity trying times afford companies to hone in on their core skills, focus on improving customer service and developing relationships and filling in any gaps. Collaboration and knowledge management tools can assist a company in taking great strides toward improved productivity.

I’ve read quite a few articles recently that discussed how, during times like this, companies can benefit from investing in software that will streamline their business, improve communication and collaboration. Well, that’s practically the dictionary definition of what an enterprise wiki can do.

Wikis allow companies to focus on what’s inside – the knowledge and creativity of its people. Let’s say a company decides not to proceed with the external lead generation program. Instead, salespeople are told to concentrate on the leads they have. Well, then they better become a lot more creative with the sales pitch if they’re going after leads they may already have reached out to.

With a wiki, that sales team, no matter where they are located, can collaborate online, spur creative ideas, discuss and share creative pitches that worked for someone else. With discussion forums and document sharing and editing, the European sales force can pitch in their ideas while the California sales team members are sleeping.

In Alex Jefferies’ recent Sales 2.0 report, he states: “The multitude of uses has led the majority (59%) of best-in-class companies to either leverage, or plan to leverage, internal wikis.”

The most successful companies are doing it; there must be something to it.

Some Things in Life Really Are Free

2008-10-31T12:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve written before about wikis in academia. I believe deeply in the value of wikis in this area – for administrators, professors, researchers, as well as for students.

For students, in particular, it is challenging to find the budget for new software and applications to help muddle through the process. But students can benefit so much from using technology for research, group coordination, collaboration, project planning and more.

Plus, students who use and become comfortable with business software and applications while still in school will be more prepared when they enter the workforce. I wish I had a wiki to use to manage my projects while I was in college!

That’s why, although SamePage is an enterprise wiki, I was part of the team that put together the plan to offer SamePage version 4.0 FREE to university students with an .edu email address. All students need to do is sign up at http://samepage.spwiki.com. They can include up to five users in their group. It’s simple and straightforward. The interface is user friendly and utilizes a WYSIWYG editor, so students don’t need technical expertise. In addition to the collaboration features, there are discussion forums and a blog element.

Some things in life really are free. And when this phenomenon occurs, people should reach out and grab it. That’s exactly what we hope students will do with SamePage v. 4.0.

Content is King

2008-10-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Alex Jefferies, senior research associate at Aberdeen Group, explains the ‘why’ behind wikis:

“The guiding philosophy behind a wiki is really quite simple: content is king. In other words, the benefit derived from an enterprise wiki depends greatly on the amount of information contributed by users."

The most successful organizations are the ones who are able to spark a high degree of employee adoption. The result of such adoption ranges from a dynamic glossary of company-specific terminology to a forum for new employee ideas. In fact, many organizations are using wikis as a training platform, one where they can centralize FAQs and best practices for use in the onboarding process. The multitude of uses has led the majority (59%) of best-in-class companies to either leverage, or plan to leverage, internal wikis.”

The key findings of Alex’s recent Sales 2.0 report show a correlation between companies that utilize wikis as part of a sales program and improving sales. But what we also know is that a wiki is only as valuable as the content employees put in there.

Not sure what to put on your corporate wiki? According to Stewart Mader, wiki consultant and blogger, “A wiki can be especially useful for commonly needed information, like FAQ, guidelines, HR or purchasing policies.” He gives more details in a recent article.

So go forth and populate your company’s wiki!

SamePage 4.0

2008-10-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

Last week, our team was busy with finalizing and announcing SamePage version 4.0. The focus of this release is technology enhancements and product improvements that better meet the needs of large enterprises. Scalability is a key challenge of software implementation in large enterprises. Software can become cost prohibitive, when scaling it up costs an arm and a leg.

That's a key reason SamePage is one of the few wikis that can scale in a cost-effective way.

Some highlights of the new release include:

- Increases scalability for large enterprises.
- Improved performance of wiki based on new Java technologies
- REST-based Web services integrate with other enterprise applications
- Enables direct content creation between the wiki and web portals
- Users can now create and collaborate around charts and tables with new database and chart plug ins
- New baseline version of the software

Alex Jefferies, a senior research analyst with Aberdeen who has just completed a report entitled, Sales 2.0, said:

"Large companies are furiously searching for effective ways to collaborate outside of traditional and laborious methods, such as email. The benefit of an enterprise wiki is that it allows for efficient project or procedure collaboration, without burdening employees with a never-ending flurry of emails. Organizations who are currently using internal wikis have found applicable uses in everything from project collaboration to creating a dynamic glossary of company-specific terms and practices to help onboard new hires."

I fully agree with Alex’s assertion – indeed this has been one of our key messages.

If you prefer, the complete list of features and release notes are available at: http://support.etouch.net/cm/wiki/?id=57940

Don't take my word for it though, try it yourself. Anyone can sign up for a free trial; no matter what size your business, or even for personal use.

Aberdeen on Sales 2.0

2008-10-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

Aberdeen Group just released a Sales 2.0 report: Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration.

The crux of the study is examining how companies are and have the potential to shorten sales cycles and increase productivity by utilizing Web 2.0 tools.

The timing for data like this is impeccable. The US economy is going through tough times, and companies need to proactively sell more to survive and compete in these trying times. Cost-effective tools and technological advancements become that much more valuable during difficult economic periods.

According to the report, 45% of 210 companies surveyed that use social media within both the sales and marketing departments experience year-over-year improvement in lead qualification rates.

“The pressure to increase top-line revenue growth (63%) and improve overall sales productivity (60%) were identified by survey respondents as the top two pressures causing organizations to focus resources on the organizational capabilities and technology enablers use to improve sales performance,” it says in the executive summary.

It’s a good sign for enterprise wikis. Wikis are a cost-effective technology solution to collaboration and knowledge management challenges.

“As sales managers search for effective ways to manage their teams outside the traditional avenues of meetings and emails, wikis allow for project and team collaboration around a certain account or opportunity.”

There are a lot of interesting numbers and concepts expressed in this Aberdeen report that I plan to revisit. For example, Aberdeen’s report stresses how crucial it to the success of an enterprise social media / Sales 2.0 initiative to have the support of senior management. Download the report today.

The Next Phase of Collaboration

2008-09-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

This week, Cisco officially launched its new collaboration portfolio consisting of Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence and a new Web 2.0 application platform. According to Cisco, all of these use the network as the platform to help enable people to connect, communicate and collaborate from any application, device and workspace.

The new portfolio products include Cisco Unified Communications System Release 7.0, TelePresence Expert on Demand and a Web 2.0 Applications Platform, which is Cisco WebEx® Connect, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. It integrates presence, instant messaging, Web meetings and team spaces with traditional and Web 2.0 business applications, including SamePage.

As a SamePage team member, I’m looking forward to experiencing the power of Cisco behind our dynamic Wiki. The partnership between SamePage and Cisco WebEx enables enterprises to combine the application mash-up capabilities of WebEx Connect with the collaborative content editing capabilities of the SamePage enterprise Wiki.

It truly creates a powerful new way through which businesses can share information with employees, customers and business associates. I've been using WebEx Connect for the past few months and find the interaction with SamePage is seamless and powerful.

The collaboration market, especially as it relates to Web 2.0 and enterprises, is coming into its own.

Academic Wikis

2008-09-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

One of the wiki industry’s foremost evangelists, Stewart Mader, is a big believer in the use of wikis in education; he wrote a book on it. More recently, Stewart was quoted in an article in Edutopia introducing educators to the wiki.

The reporter, Grace Rubenstein, opens her article with: “A simple, cheap technology with a funny name will become an even more powerful portal into creative teaching and learning this year.” She goes on to delve into the different ways that wikis can be used in an educational environment.

There are so many levels of potential use of a wiki in education. For example:

Students can better manage their projects, assignments, both individual and with teams
Teachers and professors can manage classes and assignments, on a daily, quarterly and annual schedule; they can easily create specific project areas for different classes.
Teachers and professors within a department can share information, collaborate on successful techniques
Research departments can collaborate and share research knowledge
Cross-departmental information can be easily shared and disbursed
Meeting minutes can be posted for teacher groups and discussions

A number of educational institutions have already determined how to best put wikis to use.

There are free, open-source wikis that are valuable tools for students and teachers. But from a big-picture perspective, a university, college, high school or any other type of school might find that a proprietary software tool allows them to benefit from a wiki while protecting their knowledge base. Teachers and administrators can add varying degrees of security to whatever areas of the wiki need it, while creating general areas in which anyone can participate.

The wiki possibilities are nearly limitless.

Take this, for example. The Edutopia reporter talked with a high school technology teacher in Georgia who has encouraged and organized student collaboration across continents, between the US classroom and Bangladesh. That is obviously a teacher who understands the value of the wiki and is ready to use new technology to benefit students. And that's the kind of inspiration we expect and hope for in our educational institutions and our teachers.

From Email’s Cold, Hard Grasp

2008-09-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

And that doesn’t even say anything about time wasted from spam and junk emails, ‘thank you’ emails, BCC emails you got ‘just in case,’ because Rob is trying to cover his back and so on. Email has a strong grasp on us; there’s no denying it. And there’s no denying its value in many business instances.

In a recent article in the NY Times, Luis Suarez, a self-proclaimed social computing evangelist with IBM wrote: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip. “I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return,” he wrote.

And millions silently nodded their heads in agreement.

Luis is focusing on using other, new technologies to increase productivity. He’s talking about creating an online environment that fosters collaboration allows people to reclaim their productivity. He’s not spouting ideas that you should stop emailing your mother in South Africa. He’s simply saying, see what else is out there and see if you can shift your communications to other tools.

And maybe, just maybe, the professional masses will find that email is not always the best solution.

"Enterprise Social Networking is Inevitable"

2008-09-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

Wainhouse Research recently released Volume 1 of The Enterprise Social Networking Landscape report. The basis of the findings? Enterprise social networking is inevitable. It's a $200 million market with some well-established players, as well as a number of small start-ups.

Researcher David Dines wrote about it on his Enterprise Social Networking blog. He purports that, just like email and instant messaging, employees are going to use social networking tools, no matter what, "so management might as well give them the tools, so they have some input." Dines predicts the business will be $2 billion in 5 years, growing at a rate of approximately 40% annually.

In the executive summary viewable at Wainhouse.com, it says: "SN [social networking] has core functionality that enables companies to streamline internal business processes like collaboration, data capture, data search and finding experts. Additionally, SN can enhance external communications by providing more avenues and a higher level of interaction with customers, partners and shareholders."

I like the tune they are singing in this report. Dines is reporting on benefits of enterprise SN tools that we've been shouting about from the rooftops for years. (What? You didn't hear us?! Sorry, we'll shout louder!)

In fact, if you read up about tools like enterprise wikis, the reported advantages are consistent across industry and geographical lines. Forward-thinking companies around the world are benefiting every day from improved collaboration and knowledge management. If you ask me, every other company is just missing the boat.

Gartner Analysts Want Web 2.0 at Work

2008-08-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

In a recent article on eWeek.com , a journalist delved into the argument of two Gartner analysts who say that Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other social applications that allow for messaging and collaboration in the workplace should not be banned.

It’s a fine line for employers to walk – to allow social networking sites or not in the workplace. They can be time sinks, of course. And I agree with the reporter who writes: “Some people spend so much time on these networks that their use of social apps could impede productivity.”

But still, it is important to note that employees like the give and take of creative and collaborative online environments. It’s the way the world is moving. So why can’t employers embrace it and put Web 2.0 technologies to work for them?

That’s part of what makes enterprise wikis so exciting. Employees can have the instant gratification of sharing information online with their friends/co-workers. Yes, it’s work focused, but employers can define areas that allow employees to have a little more fun with the wiki and to enjoy using the technology. For example, employers can create a community area for staff to create their own pages in. Community policing and the wisdom of crowds inevitably ensure that only appropriate content is created and disseminated through Web 2.0 technologies.

Kudos to Web 2.0 innovators that create Wikis and blog for ensuring harmonious social networking tools within the Enterprise.

Unleashing Wikis

2008-08-22T16:29:00.001-07:00

I’ve been working in the world of wikis for some years now. It’s an exciting and useful technology with so many enterprise uses. But lately, the landscape has changed. Wikis have turned a corner and are starting to receive a lot more attention – in corporate uptick, media coverage, blogger discussions and so on. And, I mean, WOW!

But when there’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot to sift through. That can be challenging for corporate tech people looking for a dynamic enterprise wiki solution that is right for their company’s needs. My goal with this blog is to provide an educated, experience outlook on wikis and all the uses, benefits, challenges that relate to them.

Collaboration and knowledge management are key to a company’s success and often challenging areas for businesses, non-profits, educational institutions and so on. I believe wholeheartedly that using technology tools can dramatically improve how a company manages these challenges. I look forward to discussing these issues on this blog.