Wiki Works - the workhorse of any social intranet

Blogs are cool, social bookmarking sites are neat, but I really think wikis are the big news in the intranet 2.0 space.

At our company, we launched a wiki last fall (almost a year ago now...wow!) and it has mostly become the internal wikipedia. The wiki contains a lot of glossary terms pulled from all over the company from different business unit's websites. This has made it much simpler to find what the specialized terminology of our business means.

However I want more! I have been using the wiki for all my intranet documentation, support lists, application change logs, etc. But how do I get other people interested?

I see one problem with our setup, a slightly modified version of Screwturn Wiki, has no security. Sure it tracks who wrote what, but I would love to have a bit more partitioning, like the Workspaces concept in Socialtext's workspace concept, allowing separate work areas for projects teams, wikipedias, and onboarding, to name a few.

So what are your thoughts for wikis in the social intranet?

Building a better "Employee Chooser"

I have been faced with a UI design problem on our Performance Management system that I am currently building.



There is one area within the site where leaders have the ability to choose another employee within the company to request feedback for one of their direct report's performance review. This is simple stuff, except the UI bit for picking what employee to send the request to.



I have written a couple other apps in the past that needed to do this type of work, but I really did not like the solutions I came up with, namely some type of a drop down list or select list with all the names listed. Problem is, with over 4k employees...this is a really long list.



I like the idea of a type-ahead search box that could show the name, title and photo of a group of employees based on the search string entered. Something like Google's Enterprise Labs "Search as you Type" plug-in for the Google Search Appliance.


So what other ideas do you all have? Please leave me a comment!