Notes about Wikis in Business

(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20011277/site/newsweek/page/0/) IBM has used internal wikis since 2005, with an eye to selling the concept to its clients. One of its first applications was a wiki that employees could use to collaborate on writing a blogging manifesto: a set of policies for appropriate use of blogs in and out of the office. Thousands of employees contributed and edited that manifesto, which after receiving corporate approval—became the company’s official policy.

Today, workers throughout the global company are connected by an internal portal called WikiCentral, which more than 100,000 employees use for updating product documentation and modifying company policies, and for maintaining their own corporate profiles—a sort of business MySpace. And for the past couple of years, IBM has incorporated the wiki and other collaborative software into its corporate products like Lotus Notes, a desktop software for accessing e-mail and other applications. Its most advanced tool, the Quickr 8, combines blogs, wikis and plug-ins called “connectors” to link a range of business documents and libraries.

(http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/WikiSym2005) […] Shashi Seth, product manager at Google said that Google is built on wikis. They don’t have a conventional intranet, wikis are the intranet. He said that 5000 employees use two wikis, TWiki and SparrowWeb. (Although there are some common elements, I do not consider Sparrow a wiki.)