This is a guest post by Robin Singh.  Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He is well acquainted with various Knowledge base tools and is currently associated with ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling

Choosing a wiki for your business organization is one of the best decisions you can make as they are time-effective and will help you streamline your operations. For instance, if you need to email some important information to a number of people within your workplace, you can easily inform everyone concerned by putting all the information in your corporate wiki. This is just one of the numerous uses of a corporate wiki.

One of the most significant benefits that a wiki offers is increased efficiency and productivity, as it can be updated by multiple users in real-time, which eventually improves communication and collaboration.

In order to choose the right wiki software for your business organization, there are some key factors that you need to consider, so read on to find out what they are.

1. Choose a Software Delivery Model for Your Needs

There are three software delivery models when it comes to choosing and managing a corporate wiki, and they include – on-premises wiki, a hosted wiki (SaaS) and an appliance wiki. If you go for an on-premises wiki, you are choosing to install the software on your own and store all of your data on your own servers. On the other hand, if you go for a hosted wiki, your wiki software vendor will store your data on their servers.

The third software delivery model is a combination of the first two models. It is a popular option as you don’t have to tackle the installation of your wiki as your solution provider will do it for you while the data remains stored on your servers.

2. Authenticate Your Corporate Wiki Users

The authentication of users is important because everyone with access should know who exactly made every single edit to your corporate wiki. Also, it will enable you to grant access to some of your wikis only to a small group of people for instance group of executives. Therefore, your corporate wiki should enable user authentication to verify the user’s identity and it can be achieved by a single sign-on  (SSO) or LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

3. Communicate with Your IT Department

Communicating with your IT department is crucial if you choose an on-premises software delivery model, because they can tell you exactly what needs to be done in order to successfully install your corporate wiki. They certainly have the right knowledge for choosing the right wiki software for your company and they know what kind of server storage you will need. Hence, it is best to consult the IT team.

4. Eliminate the Risk of Mistakes

How many times have you edited a document and made a mistake that caused all of your added content to be completely lost? The same problem can happen with a corporate wiki as well, hence selecting the right wiki software will enable you to save each and every edit without any possible glitch taking place.

You need to ensure the software will enable you to save and track all the changes made to your wiki so that you can restore every previous version of an edited document in case the content gets lost.

5. Track Every Change Made to Your Corporate Wiki

How can you track all the changes made to your wiki in real-time? It is simple. The notifications can come in handy here. Therefore, you need to make sure you enable notifications and monitor every change that occurs. One can achieve that either by enabling email notifications or really simple syndication (RSS). RSS feeds are an effective way to keep track of the changes to your wiki as well.

Another precise way to track changes in your wiki is through external API. Tracking options are essential in keeping everything under the tab. Success tracking tools like Rise.global offers great insights to track your changes and progress. The real time tracking options and critical reporting and analytics can keep you on top of your game and offer insights to improve your team coordination even further.

6. Tag Your Documents and Make Your Wiki Easily Searchable

The most important feature of an effective wiki is its search capability. Hence, you need to make sure your corporate wiki has a powerful search option that can help the users to find exactly what they are looking for within seconds. This is especially important when your wiki grows in size, as it can be difficult and downright stressful to find relevant information.

If you choose to include tags in your documents, it will help your wiki become easily searchable and ensure users are able to instantly find any page they are looking for. However, you should avoid general tags, such as “sales” and “marketing” because, otherwise, tagging won’t be of any help when you scale your business and create a number of new documents.

7. Add as Many Useful Features as You Can

The more features you add to your corporate wiki, the more effective it would actually be. If the users find it helpful, your wiki will help them achieve their goals faster. One of the excellent and pretty useful features you could add to your wiki is multilingual support, as it can help users overcome language barriers when communicating and collaborating with those users who speak different languages.

Also, you can add the feature of attaching documents and provide a widget for making your wiki instantly accessible via your personalized web page. There are a lot more features you can consider adding to your corporate wiki, so ensure the wiki software you choose enables you to add those features most important for your business.