Earlier this week, Socialtext hosted Wiki Wednesday at its offices in Palo Alto. The focus of the meeting was on customer-facing communities powered by wikis.

Christian Wagner, Professor of Information Systems at City University in Hong Kong, was the guest speaker. The discussion covered some very public successes (and failures) of wikis, including examples from IBM, LA Times and Novell. From the meeting, there were some valuable lessons to be learned with regard to creating successful, active customer-facing wiki communities. For example, wikis with unclear ownership and a lack of incentives to drive collaboration and active participation tend to fail or lead to unmet expectations. Considerations have to be made when first setting up the wiki as to who will be editing the wiki and what is the expected business benefit and goal of the community.

It is also imperative that in the process of deploying the wiki there is definition around governance for how the wiki can and cannot be used. In short, if you want to tap the power of many without creating chaos and mass confusion, one needs to provide best practice guidelines and usage policies, as well as define a process for actively moderating and gardening the wiki. At the end of the day, in most organizations there is one opportunity to get the wiki right. If the first attempt misses the mark and fails, then re-deploying wikis (and probably other innovative Web 2.0 tools) will be harder the second time around and the projects may get delayed or blocked by management. For this reason, before kickstarting any customer-facing wiki community, it is particularly important to have a ‘triple champion’ to address the content focus, the underlying technology platform, as well as the business ‘big picture’ around the intended wiki community.

Chief Learning Officer magazine recently published an interesting article on wikis that spotlights Socialtext customer MWW Group and other organizations, like Sun Microsystems, using wikis for team collaboration, managing projects, building internal knowledgebases and better engaging with external partners and clients. The article provides some valuable guidance on the ‘best practices’ and corporate policies an organization might employ to manage the perceived risks of open, transparent collaboration using wikis. Read more

Forrester Research recently released a report entitled ‘Web 2.0 Pure Plays Might Be The Right Answer For Your Organization‘ that discusses why pure-play vendors offering best-of-breed Web 2.0 technologies, like wikis from Socialtext, can provide more value for enterprise clients than traditional suites. Forrester outlines some key requirements that Web 2.0 technologies need to satisfy around security, reliability and integration.

“Pure plays differentiate on their ability to serve the multi-faceted needs of an enterprise, such as using Web 2.0 technology in public-facing situations, across secure connections with customers and partners, and internally. These vendors implement and tune offerings for each of these use-cases. Large traditional vendors — such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP — tend to focus on internally-facing solutions that leverage their existing offerings and technology footprint.”

Forrester also points out that customers are favoring these new, pure-play vendors with more attractive licensing and distribution models, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and appliance options with flexible per-user/per-month pricing models that allow buyers to easily add and remove users as needed. Read more

With all the attention customers are paying to Enterprise 2.0 right now, AIIM – the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Association – is undertaking a market study to learn more. Socialtext is one of the sponsors of this research. To guide the study, AIIM has also assembled an advisory panel consisting of industry thought leaders such as Andrew McAfee, David Weinberger, Patti Anklam, Stowe Boyd and Eric Tsui.

By participating in the survey, AIIM and Socialtext hope to gather more opinions, first-hand experiences and general perspectives on all things related to Enterprise 2.0. For example, is Enterprise 2.0 more marketing hype than reality? What role does Enterprise 2.0 really play in an organization achieving its business goals? And what strategies are proven successful when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 adoption?

Anyone can participate in the survey, that will drive the AIIM research study, plus participants will have early access to the results. To participate, click here.