Corporate Blogging, Wiki Enabled

February 24th, 2006: US-based content management software vendor, Stellent Inc, is bringing the previously geek-centric world of the Wiki into the business world.

Stellent's Universal Content Management software solution is being bolstered to with new modules that enable corporates to make use of system-agnostic collaboration using a WYSIWYG web-based front end.

"A blog or wiki is simply another Web site among the tens to hundreds of sites a company must manage. For example, a wiki could be used to create a competitive analysis or review documentation online, and a blog might be utilized to gather immediate feedback from employees, partners and customers about new product features," says Dan Ryan, executive vice president of marketing and business development for Stellent. "Similar to other information within an enterprise, this content should be managed within a unified content management architecture. In this way, organizations can leverage the same skills, processes and software to manage all of their Web sites - leading to a lower total cost of ownership and the ability to more effectively maintain consistent branding and security across all sites."

"Companies increasingly recognize the business value wikis and blogs can generate and are looking for ways to bring these technologies into the enterprise," says Lou Latham, research analyst for Gartner, Inc. "However, there is high concern among organizations regarding how wikis and blogs can be securely managed and monitored to protect confidential or proprietary information and mitigate risk. An optimal way to address these fears is to incorporate wikis and blogs into an existing enterprise content management infrastructure offering workflow, audit trail, and records and retention management functionality that can be easily applied to these types of Web sites."

Stellent Universal Content Management now enables wiki contributors to easily create hyperlinks in both pattern-matching and wizard style formats. This capability allows users to quickly link to other topics and pages within a wiki site, as well as other Web sites. When an author creates a new hyperlink about a particular subject, the Stellent system will automatically link to a wiki page about that topic. If the page does not exist, it will automatically create a new page.

In addition, contributors can edit wiki pages in real-time and instantly view their changes, encouraging readers to quickly correct errors and fostering high-quality, collaborative authoring. The Stellent technology also records a history of wiki activity, so readers know who writes or changes content, how many times content is revised and if there are certain topics currently under heavy debate. A locking and revision control feature ensures only one user may change content at a time, and it also keeps an audit trail of all revisions which is then available for records and retention management purposes.

In FightingWhile blogs and blogging (weB-logs) have largely entered the public's consciousness, the world of the wiki is still seen to reside largely in the world of the 'geek-sphere'. The world's most famous - or notorious - wiki-based system is Wikipedia. Calling itself, "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", Wikipedia is - depending on your point of view - a superb resource for the sharing of knowledge, or a massive repository of ego-driven, easily infected pseudo information.

Would you use a wiki or blog-based system in your work environment? Comment here

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