BizSugar.com › Technology › Boosting teamwork with wikis

At its simplest, a wiki is software that lets users work together to create and edit a collection of linked web pages. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the best-known example - its 85,000 contributors have written, edited, and policed the content of more than nine million entries. Like Wikipedia, all wikis benefit from the network effect: The more people who use it, the theory goes, the better the quality of the information.

When FSB first wrote about business wikis nearly three years ago, they were largely untested, and early adopters were finding it hard to encourage employees to use them. Now the nearly universal familiarity with Wikipedia and a proliferation of services targeted at small business have helped make wikis commonplace. SocialText, one of the better-known providers, started hiring salespeople dedicated solely to the small-business market for the first time in 2007.

Many firms are keeping secure wikis for purely internal affairs. But others are finding that opening them up to customers saves a surprising amount of time, energy, and money - and offers other benefits as well. Angel.com, a McLean, Va., maker of software for calling centers, which has 55 employees, created a wiki on SocialText last year that lets clients leave comments, share their likes and dislikes, and even submit suggestions for troubleshooting the software.