Blogs & Wikis: Technologies For Enterprise Applications
The Gilbane Report provides an in-depth look on how to use blogs and wikis in the corporate world. You'll find some great examples. As I'm always trying to find cases especially outside the IT/software industries, I'm thrilled to read about Seattle Children's Hospital.
"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."In a follow-up Randomize digs even deeper into the discussion, with "Corporate limitations of Weblogs". The author proposes solutions to, among others, these problems.
- Messages have no "home" except their date, so it is difficult to locate messages even a few days later.
- Simple text comments are too restrictive for a conversation.
- Working with file attachments is a pain.