Blog Love

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.

Lucky Number 8

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.

Gil Yehuda's Got it Right

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