Amijs en Amelis implemented KWizCom’s Wiki Plus solution, creating an efficient, easy to manage corporate knowledge structure. Amijs en Amelis is a consulting firm that specializes in implementing practical solutions to enhance communication and collaboration, streamline workflow and increase the efficiency of information management in clients businesses.
The Need
To provide customers with the best solutions Amijs en Amelis needed an efficient, flexible, easy to navigate database of corporate knowledge. To effectively match the best solutions to the clients’ needs it needed to be easy to infuse the knowledge management system with new materials. It had to be simple to navigate, find and retrieve information. Amijs en Amelis needed cross-corporate system with the capabilities of adding, organizing, searching and retrieving unstructured and structured companywide information.
Amijs en Amelis relied on SharePoint team sites and fileserver functionality for the knowledge management system but found that these could not provide all the needed capabilities. Subsequently Amijs en Amelis began searching for an all-encompassing solution.
Solution
Amijs en Amelis considered basing the solution on SharePoint Server 2007, already implemented and running smoothly as the foundation of corporate workflow. This would save on implementation, training and maintenance costs however, after testing, it was discovered that the out of the box, standard wiki solution provided with SharePoint Server 2007 did not answer corporate needs. After looking into various solutions and studying their capabilities, Amijs en Amelis concluded that KWizCom’s SharePoint Wiki Plus solution seemed like the most likely candidate to fulfill their needs.
Amijs en Amelis implemented KWizCom’s solution in a test environment, experimenting with test cases, including using it as a client facing demonstration environment in order to collect feedback on the customers’ experience. After a successful pilot of 4 weeks, Amijs en Amelis decided to put KWizCom’s Wiki Plus trial version into production.
Benefits:
SharePoint Wiki Plus, like all KWizCom solutions, is a web component which adds-on to a Microsoft Enterprise Management tool – in this case Microsoft SharePoint.
KWizCom’s solution meshed smoothly with the SharePoint infrastructure already a major part of the Amijs en Amelis workflow. Subsequently KWizCom’s already “pocket friendly” solution became an even more logical choice for the company as the smooth integration saves Amijs en Amelis development costs or the cost of buying and maintaining an additional, external solution. KWizCom solutions are easy to deploy and are designed for intuitive operation, qualities that aside from granting easy implementation also prevent expensive “down time” where employees need to be trained to use the new tools.
Smooth migration to the new tool was a vital consideration as Wiki Plus was to contain all corporate knowledge, without which Amijs en Amelis could not continue to serve clients. Director of Amijs en Amelis, Arjen Geerlof comments: “We did the implementation ourselves. It was easy to install – it took us 10 minutes to do it all!”
Another benefit of Wiki Plus is that it comes with rich and complete WYSIWYG functionality, which enables Amijs en Amelis to store all corporate information, including documents, with the flexibility of any wiki site while continuing to benefit from SharePoint’s powerful knowledge management capabilities.
A major benefit of Wiki Plus is the Tagging Feature web part included in the product. KWizCom’s Tagging Feature has now become Amijs en Amelis’s main navigation and classification system. The tagging feature is very flexible which allowed Amijs en Amelis to implement a corporate taxonomy that is partly structured and partly free to use.
Arjen Geerlof explains his view of the tagging feature as a corporate tool: “It was essential for us to have a tool to enable easy search and retrieval of information. As we are a small company we decided to enable users to intuitively create new tags rather than dictate a rigid taxonomy however, in a larger corporation I would recommend stricter taxonomy oversight to ensure that the flexibility of the tool is not over used.”
Nimrod Geva, KWizCom’s Group Product Manager explains: “That is the beauty of our products. We design them to be highly flexible and this allows each client to use them in the method that most suites their needs. In this manner clients, implementing our flexible, prepackaged solutions essentially end up with customized answers to their business challenges. Instead of bending the corporation to suite the tool, corporations implement our tools in the way that suites their needs giving them customized solutions at the price of a pre-packaged product.”
Search and retrieval of information is now simplified and much more user friendly, cutting down to a minimum time spent on the mechanical task of “information sorting” and freeing workers to focus on higher level tasks. In addition KWizCom’s Wiki Plus enables Amijs en Amelis to share information with select customers because it includes security capabilities other, normal wiki solutions do not have.
Director of Amijs en Amelis, Arjen Geerlof describes future plans for Wiki Plus: “We are going to use the Wiki Plus solution to structure our project meetings, take notes and define tasks immediately and connect existing content with new information.”
Products and services used:
Amijs en Amelis used the following products to implement and operate the KWizCom’s SharePoint Wiki Plus solution:
- Windows 2008 servers for hosting SharePoint (small farm),
- SharePoint Server 2007 standard edition
- KWizCom’s SharePoint Wiki Plus solution.
