Note: Running most Fridays in FromGregsHead.com, is a continuing series of tips brought to you by Greg Price. These run Saturday mornings during the BusinessMaker’s Radio Show on KPRC 950AM. Audio files can be found on the Entrepreneur’s Playbook page of the PKF Texas website.
For those businesses ready to commit to knowledge development, there are loads of tools to facilitate speedy information sharing and creation. Depending on your needs, you might choose to use one or all of the following:
- Portals. Portals take advantage of technologies like SharePoint and their virtual team sites are ideal for structured, process-oriented tasks requiring document creation and versioning.
- Blogs. Found on either company internal, or external Web sites. Blogs can also give employees that might not normally be called upon, the opportunity to espouse ideas in an informal environment.
- Wikis. One of the newest arrivals on the scene is the wiki, a Web site to which anyone can add, modify or edit material simply by clicking on an “edit” button. Wikis can also help manage open, unstructured business collaboration, such as in an engineering or RAD (rapid application development) environment. Wikis are different than blogs and portals in that information presented in those tools remains static.
- Mash-up: The term originated in the hip-hop world to refer to remixing songs, but now “mash-up” can also describe the practice of combining applications or tools from different sources. Like using Outlook and Dynamics NAV CRM for sales collaboration purposes.