Knowledge Management with a Company Wiki

What Is a Company Wiki?

A company wiki is a digital knowledge store. It works exactly like the model “Wikipedia”, but is used specifically for a company. A wiki consists of a network of articles that are linked to each other. Each article covers a specific topic. If an author within an article refers to a related topic, they can reference it in the text by creating a link. Using this, the reader can quickly jump from one article to the next.

The word “wiki” comes from Hawaiian and means “fast”.

An internal company wiki is an important part of knowledge management, as companies collect their know-how within it. It thrives on employees documenting their knowledge and experiences and sharing them with colleagues.

What Is a Company Wiki Used For?

Company-internal know-how is a valuable resource, but is frequently neglected. This leads to departments not working together optimally or important processes being dependent on individual persons.

A wiki prevents such negative developments by collecting, networking, and sharing knowledge. Employees provide important information, processes, or documents that colleagues can access quickly and easily.

This gives rise to many use cases for knowledge management in companies. In the following, we present some examples:

Quality Management

A wiki is the ideal place for process descriptions: in which order should inspection XY best be carried out? What steps are required for customer acquisition? Questions like these can be quickly resolved with suitable wiki articles. This ensures that your processes remain comprehensible and meet quality standards.

Innovation Management

Employees are a valuable source of ideas for new products, better services, or more efficient processes. With a company wiki, they have the opportunity to systematically collect these ideas. Further tools (such as the morphological box) help to make ideas more concrete.

Customer Service

Customers often have similar questions — Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs. With a company wiki, you record the answers once and centrally. This means employees have the right answer immediately at hand, instead of reinventing the wheel each time. Thanks to automatic table of contents, the question being sought is quickly found.

Employee Training

Onboarding new employees is time-intensive. A company wiki offers many possibilities to make the process as efficient as possible. For example, introduce an internal company glossary, create interactive case studies or profile sheets for your products including data sheets. This makes getting started as easy as possible.

What Benefits Does a Company Wiki Offer?

Companies that use an internal company wiki for their knowledge management benefit from several advantages:

• Transparency: Through a company wiki, important information is accessible company-wide. It promotes cross-departmental exchange and prevents specialist knowledge from being lost when employees leave the company.

• Efficiency: Thanks to the networked structure of a wiki, information can be found easily and supplemented quickly. In the form of a cloud solution, employees can also access the wiki from the home office or while on the move and do not need to ask colleagues for the required information.

• Participation: A wiki thrives on being maintained and shaped by many employees. It enables employees to share their own knowledge and benefit from the experiences of others, regardless of company hierarchy. This additional level of communication promotes a good company culture.

• Standardisation: A company wiki is the central point of contact for employee questions and replaces many other information sources. This ensures that information is uniform and up to date (Single Source of Truth). The layout is predefined so that all wiki articles also look visually consistent.

What Are Typical Objections to a Company Wiki?

Certain objections are frequently raised by employees or the works council against the introduction of a company wiki. We address some typical examples in the following:

• Security: Passwords, malicious code, or false information can get into the wiki.

• Dangers of this kind arise from improper or even misuse of the wiki and cannot be ruled out with comparable systems either. Appropriate training and the multiple-eyes principle that prevails in a wiki help to prevent security risks.

• Data protection: Employee data is recorded when editing and can be analysed.

• In order to be able to trace the change history of a wiki article, automatic versioning is important. In this process, only the editor and the time of editing are stored. Sensitive employee data is not accessible but remains in the protected HR area of the system.

• Costs: The effort involved in introducing and maintaining a wiki is not proportionate to the benefit.

• Wiki articles can be created easily and found quickly. Without a wiki, the right contact person must first be found. This costs time and ties up employees, particularly experts within the company. A wiki ensures knowledge transfer and therefore pays for itself in the medium and long term.

These and other concerns should be considered and discussed before introducing a company wiki. On closer inspection, however, the points mentioned can be put into perspective.

What Makes the projectfacts Wiki Special?

The projectfacts wiki is a fully comprehensive company wiki. It offers all the features you would expect from a wiki system. What makes it particularly valuable for knowledge management beyond that is its integration with other areas of the company.

As all-in-one business software, the wiki in projectfacts is fully integrated. Instead of relying on isolated solutions, you have everything in one system. You notice this in everyday work in many places:

Topic-Specific Wiki

Create topic-specific wikis in projectfacts, e.g. for projects or customers. This allows you to record everything important that needs to be taken into account with a customer. Introduce a project glossary or a changelog for your development projects. You can link the associated project or the CRM contact of the customer directly in the wiki article. This allows you to work seamlessly within one system instead of switching from application to application.

Interactive Wiki

You can embed a wide variety of other system elements directly into the projectfacts wiki, e.g. the business cards of employees, system directories, or individual files. For example, simply store a contact person for certain wiki articles who is available for further enquiries. The colleague’s business card updates itself based on the HR data. If a telephone number changes, you can rely on it being displayed correctly in the wiki.

Reporting Wiki

Reports in projectfacts can also be integrated into your wiki articles. Simply supplement information about your company or individual departments with relevant statistics. The embedded reports are always up to date and can also be filtered and edited within the wiki. This automates your reporting, as the manual creation of Excel sheets or PowerPoint slides is no longer necessary.

How Does the projectfacts Wiki Work?

Wikis have a kind of “universal language” that makes it easy for users to create articles. projectfacts also follows this language. So if you have already worked with a wiki system, you can get started immediately.

In the following, we introduce some basic commands that you can use in the wiki editor of projectfacts.

Headings

The wiki distinguishes between several hierarchy levels for headings, just like HTML. H1 headings are indicated with an equals sign before and after your text. Subordinate headings receive one additional equals sign per level:

Wiki Syntax	Result
=Heading 1=	Heading 1
==Heading 2==	Heading 2
===Heading 3===	Heading 3
…	…

Font Style

You can adjust the font style in various ways. Bold and italic are indicated with apostrophes, superscript and subscript with corresponding tags:

Wiki Syntax	Result
”italic”	italic
'''bold'''	bold
'''''bold and italic'''''	bold and italic
Textsuperscript	Textsuperscript
Textsubscript	Textsubscript

Links

Links can refer both to articles within the wiki and to external websites. Addresses on the company’s own server can also be accessed in projectfacts:

Wiki Syntax	Result
[[New Page]]	+ New Page
[[New Page]This will be my new page]]	+ This will be my new page
[https://www.google.de/\|Google\]	Google
[{{SERVER}}/projectfacts/dispatcher/HomePortal.do|projectfacts Home Page]	projectfacts Home Page

Lists

The projectfacts wiki distinguishes between simple and numbered lists. Simple lists are marked with asterisks, numbered lists with hash symbols. With each list level, an additional asterisk or hash symbol is added.

Wiki Syntax	Result
\* one	- one
\* two	- two
\\ two-one	- two-one
\\ two-two	- two-two
\* three	- three

# one	- 1. one
# two	- 2. two
## two-one	- 1. two-one
## two-two	- 2. two-two
# three	- 3. three

Images

Images are inserted using the command “[[Image:ImageName]]”. Additional parameters can be passed after a vertical separator (pipe), e.g. a caption, the alignment (right, left, center, none) and whether the image should be displayed at original size or as a thumbnail (orig, thumb).

Wiki Syntax	Result
[[Image:ImageName|My Caption]]	My Caption
[[Image:ImageName|right|thumb|noname]]

Tables

A table is virtually “drawn” in wiki syntax. The following scheme applies:

• {| Table |}
• |- New Row
• | New Column
• ! Header Row

A simple table is constructed as follows, for example:

Wiki Syntax	Result
{| |- ! Heading !! Heading !! Heading |- | Example1 || Example2 || Example3 |- | Example4 || Example5 || Example6 |}
---	---
Example1	Example2
Example4	Example5

Further Elements

In the projectfacts wiki, a number of further elements can also be integrated into an article. You can find an overview here:

• Business cards [[Card:Name]]
• Reports [[Report:Name]]
• Search function [[Search:Name]]
• File [[File:Name]]
• Folder [[Folder:Name]]

The easiest way to insert new elements is to first call them up and then select them from the list of recently used elements in the sidebar.

Questions, Wishes, or Feedback?

Are you interested in the possibilities of the projectfacts company wiki? Contact our consulting team — we are happy to help.

Not yet using projectfacts? Test the software including the wiki free of charge and without obligation for 14 days.