Setting up a private company wiki is a great way to store important information about your company, and a convenient place to document company procedures and define job roles for your employees. Best of all, setting up a wiki is free, and you can have complete control over what information is stored and who sees it.
You’re probably familiar with Wikipedia.org, the free online information depository that seems to be at the beginning and end of congressional research efforts these days. What you might not know, however, is that a “wiki” in Internet terms is nothing more than a website or section of a website where multiple people can contribute content. The word was borrowed from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means “quick.” You can verify that fact on Wikipedia!
Most of the wiki sites you know are probably public websites, but there’s nothing stopping you from setting up your own private wiki as a convenient depository of information that relates to the operation of your online company or business. Keeping specific company information in one secure location is convenient and extremely useful.
This works especially well when you have a company with more than one employee at remote locations. Setting up a “company wiki” gives you a place online to deposit important information for employees, such as links to tax forms, codes of conduct, or legal notices about employee rights. You can also use it to store general company information that other employees might need to access, such as your company’s tax-ID number, company fax lines, mailing address, staff contact information, or listings of all company websites and their admin areas.
A private wiki is especially useful though for documenting company procedures.
Consider that each job at your company should be clearly defined, and a company wiki is an excellent place to store job descriptions. Let’s say your company employs a ‘Website Content Manager’ whose job includes verifying the accuracy of information offered on your website. This employee no doubt has a set of procedures that he or she needs to follow while carrying out assigned tasks. Perhaps your website includes a listing of software vendors, and this employee needs to monitor entries on that list on a regular basis to verify they are still valid. That means checking links, verifying descriptions, and when appropriate, logging into an admin area to delete outdated links or change information. This entire process can be documented on your company wiki, making it that much easier to get the next employee up to speed and productive should your current employee leave for greener pastures.
If you employ a system administrator, you have to be concerned about that person being the sole source of knowledge about how to get things done on your servers. If your system administrator leaves for another company, will you know how to train his or her replacement? Will you know where files are kept on your server? Do you know about any custom software that has been installed to administer your websites? Asking your system administrator to document how to accomplish basic admin tasks is a really good idea, and your next administrator will thank you if your wiki is loaded with information about your specific setup.
Now for some really good news.
Setting up a company wiki is free, and the same software that powers Wikipedia.org is open source. You can download it at MediaWiki.org, and assuming your server meets some basic requirements, you can have it installed and running in almost no time.
Spend some time thinking about security, however. You’ll want to make sure your wiki is password-protected, and that employees access it via a secure connection so that usernames and passwords can’t be intercepted. Since no system in 100% secure (an employee might be careless with his account information, for example), you might want to refrain from putting extremely sensitive information on your company wiki, just in case.
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