Elsewhere, Dennis and I have been talking about creating a Wiki encyclopaedia for UK/Europe SME businesses. This morning he asked me about how we use Wiki technology in our business, and I related this story. I wanted to set up an intranet for the partners and sales offices who sell Twinfield outside of the Netherlands to share information, ideas, marketing collateral, anything. I was pressurising headquarters and nothing was getting done, because they were focusing on other things. At one of our partner meetings on a Wednesday, I got fed up and said I would have something set up so we could all access it by the following Monday (they all thought I was barmy!).
I signed up for a hosted Wiki service (called JotSpot), which gave us enough space to do the job and up to 25 users for $9 a month. I spent a few hours on the Sunday morning creating a framework of pages with all of the things I expected we would want to share, and some explanation and guidelines on how we should all use and develop the resource. Everybody got e-mailed their user IDs on the Monday, and we have been using it ever since. Whenever one of the territories creates some collateral, or executes a marketing initiative, they put it on to the intranet so it can be re-used or adapted. If we find out something new about one of our competitors, we add it to that section. You can even e-mail material to each page in the site, so sometimes it’s just a matter of a CC on a mail to get content on to this shared resource. No development time was required, apart from using the Wiki content management system to write the pages.
Just think how useful that could be as a knowledgebase for your own practice or company, and you could start within minutes of reading this post. As well as JotSpot, you could use SocialText, the solution that will host our new small business Wiki. Their new pricing model even means that you could start for free if you needed 5 users or less!
Technorati Tags : JotSpot, SocialText, wiki, intranets
Technorati Tags : JotSpot, SocialText, wiki, intranets
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