Enterprise wiki chosen for KM needs

Student Affairs Information & Technology Services (SAITS) within the Division of Student Affairs at California State Polytechnic University Pomona has chosen an enterprise wiki solution, eTouch’s SamePage, for its knowledge management needs.

According to eTouch, SAITS evaluated a number of technology options including Microsoft Word, content management systems (CMS) and open source wikis, before selecting its wiki solution.

Kevin Morningstar, executive director of SAITS, says, "With Word, the documents were not very searchable, and we had limited ability to share these documents at the same time. We tried to use a CMS to create internal Web pages, but it wasn’t set up to manage dynamic pages with multiple contributors at multiple times. It was unwieldy and simply not friendly for collaboration."

Concerning SAITS’ choice of SamePage, Morningstar continues, "I definitely feel we made the right choice. We didn’t do any training, but everybody can jump in and use the product with zero startup time. It’s that intuitive."

eTouch reports that:

• The SAITS evaluation team determined that wikis, by their very nature, offer a collaborative environment to build content, as well as support the critical search, linking and information accessibility that were key elements in compiling and sharing the department’s knowledge.
• One member of the SAITS team had the wiki up and running in 24 hours, and no team training was necessary.