Does Your Small Business Need its own Wiki?
If you have trouble keeping up with all the information required to run your company, consider setting up an internal wiki for your crew. You can set one up in minutes online, no server or technical expertise required. They’re secure, easy to use, and may bring a new level of organization to your company.
When I joined BookFool.com last year, we suddenly had the need to coordinate info among three full-time Fools working in 2 different states. We needed to keep track of who was doing what and when it was due. We also had a lot of documents to push around and revise. The wiki saved our life!
Why Bother?
With your own private, internal wiki, you can do all kinds of things:
- Keep track of the logins to your dozens of social networking sites.
- Start conversations with the entire organization.
- Share articles and your comments on them.
- Store photos and documents.
- Track your assets.
- Keep up with customer contact info.
- And more.
Instead of emailing everyone in the company to find out who has the latest version of your company’s employment application, look it up in the wiki. Instead of emailing around a document for everyone’s approval, put it in the wiki and let everyone hammer on it until it’s ready for the public. Archive that great email conversation between you and the head of sales where everyone else an comment on it.
We keep our Mission, Vision, and Values in the wiki where any Fool can see it and edit as necessary. We keep all kinds of stuff in there. Our wiki now comprises 555 pages. It’s the BookFool.com Brain.
This is our page for tracking assets.
Ready to Try Your Own?
After looking at all the web-based wikis out there, my wiki of choice is PBWorks (formerly PBwiki). They have a free option so you can get a feel for how it works before signing up for one of their reasonable paid packages. Their uptime and support are top-notch. I accidentally broke our wiki by uploading a corrupt file, and they had it fixed in no time.
You can also customize the look of your wiki (see above) and set different access levels for each user.
Because I currently work from home in Mississippi and spend all day on the computer, I may be more of a Wiki Power User than most. I looked up my usage stats and found I’m averaging over 40 page views per day. That’s a lot of wiki-ing. But even if you’re not a power user like me, you’ll still find ways to simplify your work life with this powerful tool.
If you currently have trouble keeping up with documents, ideas, conversations, logins, photos, or almost anything else, put them in a wiki and simplify your life.
