It's an amazing thought that there are companies out there that do nothing but own knowledge, and they make a good living doing it. They are called Intellectual Property (IP) owners. IP owners are not new businesses, but the thought of owning intellectual property does make you wonder. If a company can sustain itself just from licensing an "idea" held within a patent or other copyrighted work, what are you doing with your IP?
Customers who have been with us for a while, or even a short time, know that one of our greatest assets beyond our servers and network are the talented employees we hire. With all the talent we have on board, you can imagine how much information and great ideas flow between employees. So the question of the day is how do we keep track of that information and utilize it to help our customers in the best way possible?
I have one word for you: TWiki.
TWiki is one of the many wiki systems readily available on the Internet. Just Google “wiki” and look at all the software programs that return in the search engine results. We chose TWiki as our preferred program to use internally at FastServers.Net. Why? Well, wiki systems are fundamentally editable web pages that can easily scale and grow with your company and organization’s needs. And TWiki provides functionality so anyone can create, edit, and update the content within the system. This completely eliminates the need for one person to control the source for web page updates, edits, and establishing new methods.
Just look at TWiki's mission statement:
"TWiki is a leading-edge, web-based collaboration platform targeting the corporate intranet world. TWiki fosters information flow within an organization; lets distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively; and eliminates the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content."
Originally at FastServers.Net, we utilized TWiki to replace our very own "one-webmaster syndrome" for internal How-Tos and thoroughly researched documentation. We used it to build an information database on complex issues that could be made available to future techs in the event the information was required again to assist a customer. As with many stories you'll hear from departments that implement TWiki, the scope of the project quickly grew company wide once everyone saw its potential and ease of use.
Our Billing and Sales teams now utilize it for a common source of up-to-the-minute pricing information. With TWiki, we have replaced the need for "Update Memos" that once cluttered workstation inboxes. So, the employee that has the most recent information simply makes the changes they need on a particular page in the TWiki system. Then, when an employee needs the updated information, they can go to a page in TWiki at any time and get what they need. Simple, right?
In addition to structure, TWiki provides some great tools you can’t find in other wiki systems. For example, there are various plug-ins that allow us to utilize Excel-like spreadsheets right from a web interface. No common file-sharing server required, and more importantly, no one is locked out if the file is being used by another employee. Full revision control allows us to easily audit changes that were made to an article or quickly revert to earlier versions in case information or policies have changed.
At FastServers.Net, we liked TWiki so much, we thought we'd give something back to this free open source product by helping in its development.
FastServers.Net now proudly hosts TWiki's development and bug tracking server. See what TWiki can do for your knowledge base today by visiting http://www.twiki.org/.
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