Nathan reports on the success of a wiki as a company-wide intranet. Don't be scared away their price tag --a wiki solution can be had for much less money. Wetpaint has many of the features most nonprofits would need to use a wiki as an intranet and these are available for free. Wikispaces is another option, although it's $50/year to keep your space private.

Aside from the obvious success of the initiative, I'm struck by their focus on usability:

Our customisation focused almost completely on usability. People shouldn't know or care that they are using a Wiki. All that matters is that they can easily browse, search and contribute content. (In fact, after 16 months, only a small set of Janssen-Cilag staff would think of our Intranet as a Wiki. To them, it just seems natural that Intranet software would have evolved to something this simple to use.)

The goal of technology is for it to be invisible, just the way that things are done, not some cumbersome monster. In my experience, many nonprofit and government organizations forget about this part. Wikis by their very nature are a great solution because they discourage feature creep and protect us from the excesses of an over-zealous solution to a problem. Sometimes simple is best. Actually, it's almost ALWAYS the best solution.

Thanks to Brent Schlenker for the link.

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