Hi all,

I have a question about forums that has nothing to do with Baan...

Is someone using forums within his company as an internal platform for exchanging knowledge or for support?

I am not sure if this is a thing that works, some pros and cons could be:

Pro:
A forum is a good way to ask questions if you want to ask many people, or if you do not know whom to ask.
Maybe the threshold for asking questions is lower.

Con:
You need many people that are active in the forum, for smaller companies this might be a problem.
A forum where hardly anything happens, will probably die soon.

Any experiences with this?

Thanks,
Frank

Hi Frank,

Interesting question. I know for sure that many of the big ICT players use one or more forums within their company to stimulate knowledge sharing. Most times forums are limited to one or more department or sub-organizations. But they do deliver granted they are maintained properly and have a big enough appeal. For the latter, management support plays a big role IMHO. I think you already summed up the biggest con and pro to forums. Also consider that forums are a natural web-based extension of Usenet newsgroups and that many collaboration platforms (ie Sharepoint, open-source CMS') always include a forum module. In the end, it is important to ask yourself the right questions as key in the success of any forum:

why do we need it?
what will it used for?
how will it be implemented?
what are the alternatives?

Aproximately one year ago we've started a WIKI project.
We've had many (it-internal) discussions about the project

the questions Patrick asked
how would be the acceptance?
what would be the best system: WIKI, CMS or forum?
and last, but not least: how to get the people write articles?

Such a system has to be living and to be lived.

One of our central problems has been (and is) how to find informations. We all know that the informations are anywhere out there. But where? IT, HR, FR, sales?

We've decided to try the wiki. Formerly (and now) all internal informations have been/are stored in Outlook public folders.
The first people who used the wiki (who else, the other didn't know about the existance) have been IT staff for publishing concepts, manuals and teaching material.
Meanwhile he other departments start to convert there docs from Outlook to the wiki. Now the wiki is growing. More and more departments see the possibilitys and advantages of it.

In my opinion this is a long-term project. It will need time to establish something like this.

Something about the company: ~1100 employees, 38 IT.

Regards
Christof