The term ‘wiki’ is still a mystery to most people, but the first time you try it as a collaborative space for your group, the light will go on. I thought I’d offer some attributes of wikis that distinguish them for other collaborative tools….
Some collaborative technologies provide virtual ‘meeting rooms’.
Every wiki workspace IS a meeting room – virtual, perpetual, and always open (at least to anyone who has authorized access to that activity). Unlike other ‘meeting rooms’, any well-executed wiki is fully stocked with all the documents, links, required media, and access to any member that is part of that activity through.
Some technologies are only about online document management and sharing.
Most wikis allow for the attaching, maintenance, and sharing of any media type but always in the context of individual enterprise entities and activities within those entities.
Some enterprise and document management technologies are adding notifications to their offerings.
Most wikis offer email notifications to the members of each workspace. Notifications are controlled by the individual member as to how often one wants to be notified of changes. Each page that has been changed is typically identified in the email notification.
Some legacy enterprise applications are adding workflow to their suites of applications.
Any wiki workspace can be designed to be workflow – for any type of task, project, or activity within any entity or organization. What software vendors are offering typically works only in the context of the transactions processed by that application.
Most collaboration technologies facilitate one-to-one or small groups of people – they cannot support large communities.
Any wiki can support any large or small organization in the context of very large organizations. The beauty of the wiki is the freedom with which members can come and go and participate to their own level of interest in any number of groups and activities.
There are few ways to measure the effectiveness of current collaborative technologies
Most wikis can track a variety of metrics including numbers of views over various periods of time, time spent on the site by members, who edited a page and when, numbers of edits, etc. In addition, few collaborative technologies can account for the entire audit trail of changes to EVERY page by EVERY member over the life of the workspace.
Most collaborative technologies create high user costs.
While some wiki technologies are fee/subscription based, many are not. The relatively quick installation time, learning curve, and elapsed time to creating a productive workspace makes it virtually cost free.
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