By : Nidhi Gupta

Many companies use blogs and wikis internally for a variety of uses. This is where the different feature sets of different systems start to become more important. The outward-facing uses of blogs typically need few features whereas using blogs or wikis internally (whether on an intranet or extranet) often requires a different feature set. Following examples will explain that why is it so:-

• Probably the easiest example of using a blog within a company is as a company notice board. Whether the published item is about the office party, an interesting link, or the latest sales success, a blog can help keep people informed of the small items that make a company’s culture more vital. The blog helps cut down on email traffic and nobody is inadvertently left off the mailing list.

• Navarik in Vancouver, Canada, writes software for marine shipping companies. They use a blog internally to record when an update to some software has been uploaded to the server for the customer to download. The customer can then put in comments on the latest version, such as if there are any problems found. Thus the blog serves as a log file; since the latest updates are typically the ones people are most concerned with, the reverse chronological filing order and the fact that older items fall below the fold are advantages.

• CommSecure in Australia makes e-business solutions that are installed over much of the world, with 24×7 support. They use a wiki internally to track the current status of each installation, as well as to document procedures for handling alerts, solutions to new problems, changes in contact information, etc. The wiki is easily updatable and everyone is encouraged to contribute if they have new information. If the answers are in more formal documentation, the wiki serves as the index to that documentation, which saves people in an emergency having to wade through several different sets of documentation provided by third party organizations trying to find the one vital piece of information to solve this particular problem.

• Seattle Children’s Hospital publishes intranet pages in the same way as the external pages. A blogging system (a highly modified version of MovableType) is used as the basis of the departmental web sites. Pages are created that serve as gateways to necessary manuals, making it easy for clinical staff to find the most recent version of whichever document they need. And because it’s easy for the department staff to add information about new forms or procedures, the quantity of email has markedly decreased, and the probability of a clinical staff member missing something has also decreased. The system also has plugins that enable pulling information from one blog and publishing it on another (news items, for example), which further decreases the time and effort required to disseminate information across the departments.

• Software vendors in this space have some interesting success stories to relate; two that approach the information dissemination differently are SocialText, which has more of a wiki feel (case studies available at http://www.socialtext.com/customers/) and Traction Software, which is more like a blog system (case studies available at http://www.tractionsoftware.com/solutions.htm). Both systems have aspects of both blogs and wikis, with the proportions varying according to the perceived customer requirements.

As requirements from companies become more complex, for example as the size of the company grows, or in highly competitive or heavily regulated industries, the requirements placed on the systems also grow. The trend in commercial products is towards combined systems that have features from both: blogging systems and wikis as well as full audit trails and version control. What is noteworthy about these systems is that they are using the functionality developed for personal online diaries and turning them into systems for information sharing where the individual voice and personality is less important than the information that is being imparted. This is where blogs shift focus from the sometimes hubristic to the collaborative, from the individual to the group. And thus many other types of systems that work to support collaborative efforts are looking to add blogging or wiki-like capabilities, forming hybrid systems. This trend continues, and just as content management systems now are expected to provide ways to take advantage of XML documents, so will enterprise systems be expected to provide blog-like capabilities and/or RSS feeds.

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