Capture Those Smarts!
New media also can open up channels of communication across levels and departments. A number of high-profile executives, including Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, maintain blogs, for example, and it's easy for employees to keep tabs on team members through project blogs. Wikis let employees share data, documentation and best practices.
All this raises questions for organizations with knowledge- and/or content-management programs in place, however. Gartner predicts that by next year, most enterprise CMSs (content management systems) will support wiki and blog user interfaces; several--including Open Text and Stellent--offer wiki front ends to their repositories now. Wikis and blogs are being integrated into Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, and IBM is offering the same through Lotus Notes. Apple currently bundles a blogging server with OS X Server, and a wiki is coming in the next version.
The Technology
Implementing new media is easy; scaling it is hard. Podcasts and video devour bandwidth, public blogs need to be responsive and reliable. Wikis and message boards can grow huge databases, which slow down searching. But just as users snuck rogue wireless access points in under their trenchcoats, the pervasiveness of high-quality, low-cost new-media applications are tempting users into circumventing IT. Users can start up blogs, podcasts, wikis and social bookmarks for free, and good luck blocking external use of these forums. Finding out if an employee is running a blog internally is easier, but you could spend a good bit of time on search-and-destroy missions.
A better plan: Be proactive. Set up a pilot program for end users enthusiastic about producing content; this will give IT control over the program. Issue standard audio/ video kits with cameras, microphones, audio recording devices, editing software, and copies of policies and guidelines to designated users in each department; these people can be given a training session and sent out as evangelists.
If you want to outsource, Near-Time is a hosted provider of wikis, blogs and calendars targeting small and midsize businesses. Originally a content-management system of Mac OS X, the company has moved into a cross-platform hosted collaboration model. In our last evaluation, we gave it high marks for operational simplicity and liked its respectable feature set. Since our review, it has added a WYSIWYG editor.
Behind The Scenes
New-media support mainly involves monitoring bandwidth; setting up Web servers; and providing equipment, software and a reliable delivery mechanism. Integrating a blog, wiki or message board into your corporate Web site may require some development. Then, if all goes well, you'll face scalability and performance issues just like any other high-usage server administrator.
Podcasts up the ante and can eat up bandwidth fast: A half-hour show in 128-Kbps stereo MP3 format, a decent quality level, can be as large as 30 MB. If 100 people want to watch this as a daily show, you're looking at more than 3 GB of extra bandwidth. Video requires even more resources: A Mini-DV camera gobbles around 1 GB for every five minutes of footage, so plan ahead now for when new media takes off in your organization.
