Creating an internal wiki could very well be your best decision this year. There are many internal wiki tools out there, don’t worry we have an awesome recommendation for you.
Did you know that the time spent by Engineers on searching for information has increased by 13% since 2002?
Could you believe that employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—just searching and gathering information?
Do you know 19.8 percent of the business time – the equivalent of 1 day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information on how to do their job effectively?
IDC, one of the biggest provider of market intelligence says that “the knowledge worker spends two and half hours a day which is nearly 30% of working hours, in just searching for information and 60% of their executives feel that time constraints and lack of understanding of how to find information are what preventing their employees from finding the information they need.
A recent survey by SearchYourCloud revealed, “workers took up to 8 searches to find the right document and information.”
All of the facts suggest that there is one major problem which companies are facing that is “Searching for Information.”
Most of the newly hired employees don’t add any value to the company and leave the office in less than a year because of inadequate training. They are not provided with the right information, and so they become less equipped which in turn affects the company.
Most companies keep looking for more qualified people thinking that will solve the issue of productivity. However, that is not going to be a perfect solution.
So what is going to be a perfect solution to this problem?
Well, do you know that companies which invest in employee training enjoy a higher margin of profit than companies which don’t? Do I say that you need to spoon feed every employee with what is in your brain? Obviously, that’s impossible, and that is not going to solve the time constraint instead it would make it worse. In the past people used open source wiki software like Dokuwiki, Mediawiki which are bulky and hard to use / setup or costly enterprise wiki solutions like confluence wiki which is a monthly fee / user kinna platform. Now, we have Helpie Wiki Plugin to help you create a wiki, a self hosted wiki.
Hopefully, there is a tool which plays a crucial role, and it is a lifesaver for this problem. It is known as the Internal Wiki. Having an internal wiki will make sure that all your new employees will have access to the necessary information and by making sure that they are well provided will improve your company’s profit much better than before.
What are Internal Wiki and Intranet Wiki?
An Internal Wiki is a central Repository of all information about your organisation in a single place where users can collaboratively modify content. It’s a central place where you can store internal documentation on companies policies, rules and regulations, how-to-guides, projects and much more. In simple terms, Internal Wiki is a Wikipedia made specifically for your company. When an internal wiki is hosting in an intranet, its called an Intranet Wiki.
Intranet Wiki is an awesome solution for your company wiki or your corporation wiki.
Internal wiki is also called as private wiki. There are a few internal wiki software out there which we will discuss soon.
Benefits of an Internal Wiki / Private Wiki?
Saves Time: As we spoke earlier, Internal Wiki saves much of your time by simply storing all the information in a central repository so all your employees will not waste time searching for the right information.
Project collaboration: Your teams can collaboratively work on a project which will improve the team’s productivity and efficiency to a greater extent.
Feedback: Using an Internal Wiki, you can instantly give feedback on your employee who is working on something which will make the work more impressive.
Train new employees faster: You can train all your new employees faster by having a central repository of all the information for that so that they proactively reach for every query they have
How to create an Internal Wiki?
Without wasting much, let’s dive into the most critical question of how to create an Internal Wiki. Remember we have primarily focused on creating an Internal Wiki using WordPress in this article.
Follow the below steps carefully to create a powerful internal wiki for your team:
Setup Hosting
We recommend using A2Hosting for its speed, performance, security, support and price. It’s one of the highest rated hosting providers across all the mentioned factors. We use it for all our websites.
To learn about WordPress e-commerce hosting, you can read our article on Getting Domain, Hosting and WordPress installation.
Install WordPress:
First, you need to set up a hosting account and install WordPress to create your website. If you already have a WordPress site, skip this. If not, please follow this article which will guide you through the whole process of creating a WordPress website: https://helpiewp.com/create-wordpress-website/
Download and Install an Internal Wiki Plugin:
The easiest way to create an Internal wiki website is to use a WordPress internal wiki plugin. There are several plugins available, but we recommend Helpie Kb Wiki plugin which was developed primarily to create an Internal team Wiki.
Let’s go ahead to learn how to download and install the Helpie Wiki Plugin.
Downloading the plugin:
Enough said on that, let’s move to download the plugin. Just go to www.helpiewp.com. You can purchase the plugin from there. You get a 7 day free trial when you sign up with your details.
If you are planning on creating multiple wiki websites then it is good to get the 5-site or Unlimited sites license.
Just click ‘Download Now’ button, and it will take you to the checkout page. After you have given all the payment details, it will be verified and you will receive an email through which you can download the Helpie Wiki Plugin. Download the zip file and use it for installation.
Installing and Activating the plugin:
To install the plugin, you need to go to the back-end or the admin area of your WordPress website. To access the back-end, type your website URL and type “/wp-admin.” For example “www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin.”
You would have been asked to give a username and password to go to the admin area while installing the WordPress. Just provide the details here, and you would have entered the admin area.
In the admin area, you will see an option called Dashboard in the left corner. Under Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New. Inside this page, you will have an option to upload the plugin. You need to upload the helpie.zip file which was inside the Main files folder here. Once uploaded, click the Install Now button and click the Activate Plugin button.
So now, the plugin has been installed and activated. Let’s go ahead and create an internal wiki straightaway.
Team Collaboration:
Now let’s see how a team in a company can work collaboratively using an Internal Wiki. Let’s say a team has for 4 departments of people: Product Managers, Designers, Developers, and Marketing team.
Creating and Organizing content:
First, you need to create content for specific departments and organize the content according to its department. Helpie allows you to create articles and categories.
The four departments are the categories and content to the specific departments are the articles. Go to Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Add Category. Create all the four departments (Product Managers, Designers, Developers, Marketing team) as categories.
Next, create an article under Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Add new article. You can create a title and fill the content here. You will find the four categories you have created in the right end. You can assign the article to its specific categories by just ticking the checkbox of its specific department.
Once you have created all the contents for these four departments, you can view all of them neatly organized automatically in the Main Page. To view it, go to Dashboard -> Helpie KB Wiki -> Helpie settings -> Visit Main Page.
It will take you to the Main page where you can see all your content neatly organized according to its category. You can also change the view of your listing. They basically have three listing styles: Boxed, Boxed1, and Modern. You can select any one as you wish. To set this, go to Dashboard -> Helpie KB Wiki -> Helpie settings -> Main Page Categories Listing Style. Under this, you will have the three options which we mentioned earlier.
User Collaboration and Access Levels:
For the latest information see Helpie Wiki docs:
One of the core features that an Internal Wiki should have is the ability to let your team members work together by letting them access and edit content from the front-end.
Helpie does this job perfectly for you by letting the users add/edit content from the front end without the need to access the backend. They have a special front-end editor which comes with two types of editors.
One is minimalistic, medium.com like an editor, and the other is the TinyMCE editor which has more powerful options. It also has revision system, publishing capabilities where you can set capabilities on who can edit (to be reviewed), who can publish directly and who can approve articles/revisions, and all the collaboration tools you will ever need
The other important feature is restricting access of certain departments to certain users. Some companies may want the teams to work in separate workspaces and not access other departments other than their own.
Helpie has the User Access restriction feature which keeps your content secure and restricts access to specific content using User roles or Passwords.
Let’s say you want the marketing team to only view the marketing topic and don’t want to see or access any other topic. In that case, you can set a user role for the marketing team and can restrict access to marketing topic alone so that a user with that user role will see only the marketing topic and nothing else.
If you do not want to hide the topics instead want them to see but need a login to access, you can use the password protection method. You can set the password for specific or for all categories as you wish.
Super smooth search experience:
It’s essential that an Internal wiki has a compelling search as it might have to search up to thousands of articles depending on the team size. Helpie has a blazing fast live search where they have optimized the search system to work super fast even with thousand articles in your internal wiki.
Feedback System:
The feedback system is another important component of an internal wiki. Feedback helps the team members to improve their performances which improves the team productivity. For example, designers can upload their designs and can get feedback on it and improve the design accordingly.
Helpie has two ways for the feedback system. One is their commenting section where users/team members can comment on a particular content/article. To enable commenting, go to Dashboard -> Helpie KB Wiki -> Single page -> Show comments.
It also has the Voting system where users can vote to show their opinion on an article. It has two voting systems, one is the classic voting system where you can like or dislike an article. The other is the emoticon voting system where you can use different emotions to share your opinion or feedback on an article. You can see the voting settings in Dashboard -> Helpie KB Wiki -> Single page.
Version Control:
The last and the most important feature that an internal wiki should have is the version control which helps the team to manage the changes in the articles. Helpie has two systems.
One is the Added Tag and the other is the Updated Tag. You can add any of these to your articles. Maybe when a new feature is added, the Added tag could be used. And if already an existing article is updated, the Updated tag could be used. You can see this option to add this in the right end of your kb editor.
You can also choose to show specific tags and hide others from Helpie Settings -> Components -> Tag Settings.
These are some of the most essential components any internal team wiki should have, and Helpie has got all of these in a single package.
These are important business intranet solutions for any company / team. You can create a wiki for your company today.
Try Helpie, the Best Internal Wiki Plugin >>
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