A Wiki is a managed set of web pages that can be collaborated on by a group of people. People still think of Wikis as public on-line encyclopaedias, Wikipedia being the most famous, but in fact a wiki can rapidly be implemented with no technical expertise as the next practical stage in document collaboration for a small business. There are a number of providers, such as PBWiki, that sell the product as true SaaS (Software as a Service) packages requiring no software or configuration to your own servers or PCs.
Businesses and individuals are already comfortable using Google Documents as an easy way to manage collaboration on documents, to centralise storage of these documents, and to provide some backup and security. A private Wiki for a company can be an even better alternative.
For little cost, a team can store large quantities of documents, which can be easily searched, rapidly amended from anywhere with an internet connection and automatically backed up, often with significantly more resilience than is normally within the scope of small businesses. A wiki will automatically track changes to these pages and allow you to compare or revert to an earlier version. At Lifeline IT, we use a PBWiki for our technical documentation and internal policies, but wikis are well suited to any situation where a business has several people contributing to sets of changing documents including project planning, building "how to" articles and for public or private knowledge bases.
