Recently, Stewart Mader from Grow Your Wiki, wrote a timely article on the 5 Effective Wiki Uses--and How Companies Benefit from Them in the Fall edition of Website Magazine. Citing such successful wikis as Wikipedia, Mader stresses that wikis have proven to be valuable tools - yet few companies are using them to their full potential.   

Here is a synopsis of the article citing five examples of how your business can benefit from wikis: 

Project Management - A wiki is ideal for project management because it provides a central hub to organize everthing in one place, streamline workflow, inform on progress and ultimately involve everyone. 

Customer/Client Collaboration - Wikis allow customers and clients to interact - allowing more rapid buyin and productivity. 

Documentation - Wikis are a great vehicle to build content, reports, whitepapers and other resource/technical material offering feedback, progress and input mechanisms. 

Online Community - Wikis allow for ongoing community participation (comments, responses, viral exhange) resulting in content, product or even subject matter to be scrutinized by the participants. 

Policies, FAQ, Guidelines and Best Practices - A wiki can be advantageous for commonly needed information. Editing permissions can be determined so that responsible parties can easily and readily update content.   

Ready to start a wiki?  Consider these great resources:

MediaWiki (The original wiki platform for wikipedia)

TikiWiki (Groupware/CMS (Content Management System) solution)

DokuWiki (Targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies)

Confluence (Enterprise-level)

PBwiki  (This one's free and great for beginners)

PhpWiki (Open source)

Wetpaint  (Create a wiki in three easy steps)

Best,

Denice MacDonald