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Collaboration / Knowledge solutions span across many different technical standards and feature sets. This can be confusing since people like to simplify terms. So one company might use a WIKI and another might use a Document Management Solution. In reality, each company's solution probably crosses over to implement many of the same feature sets. Across all of the software packages hundreds of feature sets exist to handle, manipulate and share information in many of these solutions. This is very confusing since at first customers will experience information overload as they search about systems containing forums, blogs, personal pages, email lists, Wiki pages, help ticket systems, event calendars, document version control and so much more. To make things more confusing: most solutions available are customizable with different versions of same type of tool to plug in and out of the overall system. As an example the web portal software solution XOOPS has 300 modules to choose from, and within that 8 distinctly different versions of forums to choose from. No easy method exists to weed out a valid system out of the countless commercial and freeware versions of software present in the marketplace. As an example I myself personally have reviewed over a hundred systems while working within Collaboration solutions.

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Sementics - Primary Purpopse

• Semantics
  The best way to look at this is to know you are implementing a Collaboration Portal: A web site which permits sharing and cross communication of information.

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It's important to define what is needed up front. Solutions often are optimized relative to their primary functional purpose and then add feature sets with an eye towards that primary purpose. As a result sometimes a company will implement several solutions even though many features might over lap. As an example one company I work for currently implements at least four different tools: Microsoft SharePoint (For online project management as requested by customers), Google JotSpot (For project forums), AtTask (For task management) and XOOPS (For internal company status reports and document libraries). These four tools overlap quite a bit their functionality, real world considerations meant it was more optimal to use several solutions in tandem together to work efficiently in each of their respective sweet spots.

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Do users need to edit content directly?

A good technical demarcation is if your users need to actively edit the content or not.

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One nice aspect of Wikis is having a larger population of resources (every user) to maintain and add content to the system. While trust issues can exist, generally these systems are more reliable and trustworthy than closed systems. As an example Wikipedia's content is constantly reviewed by not only the administrators but by the entire user community. Often spam attacks or blatantly false content is removed within a few minutes. It's a highly efficient self policing system. This type of self content management isn't always possible: yet when achievable this becomes the key to many of the most powerful collaborative systems in the market.

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Version and Revision Control.

The need for revision control is often the deal breaker for most Collaboration / Knowledge systems. This represents the ability to save documents and content over time and revert it as needed to earlier copies. Revision control is a difficult process and one which cannot be added to a solution after the fact. As a result many solutions in the market place do not offer good versioning options. Products which have document version control tend to be more expensive for this reason. However, Wikis break this rule. Wikis are based upon concurrent user input, so they require built in version and revision tracking at the get go. Consider a Wiki based solution first if version control is important for your Collaboration / Knowledge solution.

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Ease of use of the software for users.

Ideally a software solution should be geared to be easy for a user. This is difficult to judge since hundreds of different user interfaces exist with different styles and benefits. Let's look at Wikis as an example. A Wiki allows users to edit the material in real time. However, most Wikis require a user to learn a special syntax in order to edit the content. This is done for simplicity sake and as a security feature to prevent HTML injection attacks. However, this means a user might have to learn a new syntax to edit web pages. As a result not every user is going to be comfortable using a Wiki with a specialize syntax. Also roughly a hundred different software implementations of Wikis currently exist, many with their own unique syntax. Now Wikis do exist which require no special syntax, they just let you type in text changes like a standard word processor. Ideally you want to choose a Wiki which has a simplified WYSIWYG data entry interface (WYSIWYG - What You See is What You Get) to allow the greatest number of users to easily use the system.

Currently Wikis have a slightly longer learning curve since they represent the latest of the technologies within the Collaboration / Knowledge solution marketplace. The more traditional portal solutions tend to be more familiar to most people and have a quicker uptake.

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Location of Server

This translates into the question: Is your organization hosting the solution or are you buying a hosted solution.

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If you are going to host your own solution, then it's critical to pick a solution that matches to your company's base coding language (ASP vs. PHP vs. JSP as an example). Implementing a Collaboration / Knowledge solution already requires learning a new way to do business and setting up of the processes. It's important to lessen the unknowns to help in the success of the tool. As a result picking a tool which matches your department's technical staff is important. This one factor will often limit the choice of tools down to handful options. This is another reason why it's a good choice to pick a solution which is hosted outside your own resources, to help limit problems down to a minimum while concentrating on your user community.

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Searchable content.

An important feature of any system storing content, is being able to find that content again later. Most tools come with integrated search features across the web site. However, searching within stored documents is another feature which is much rarer and more expensive. If this is a critical feature then this needs to be stated up front.

Please note in many systems if you convert documents to an HTML page, it's then possible to both provide a web enabled page which is also easily searchable. A searchable attachment is often a feature which separates the inexpensive systems from the more expensive systems.

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Time.

Once the need for Collaboration / Knowledge solution is establish, you have to pick one based upon the previous considerations. It typically takes one to two months to review through all the options, narrow the choices down to a few choices and then get started to implement a new system.

Technical Summary

It should be apparent that this isn't as simple as choosing a listserv over a Wiki system. The real question is finding one or two integrated packages that come closest to your needs.

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