Do you want your new intranet to be a wiki?

In a system comparison of Linchpin with other solutions I have seen statements like: "If you want your intranet to be based on a wiki, then this is the best solution."

Wikipedia is not a top-down news site

The comparison mentioned above is not productive, but we don't like the unknown. Most people see "Wikipedia" as the only type of "wiki". Do you believe that yourself? Wikipedia is founded on the process that "everybody can change everything".

Wikipedia is not an intranet.

But for most employees an "Intranet" means their corporate news site where only the managing directors and other "official representatives" share content and their thoughts. That definitely isn't Wikipedia, right?

Linchpin brings control and Intranet 1.0 to a Confluence wiki

The magic of Linchpin is that it adds some element of control to the buzzing wiki foundation. It provides the traditional “Intranet 1.0” that all managers have in mind when they think of an intranet.

All solutions can do this, it's nothing special. Every intranet solution can publish corporate news.

If you highlight the wiki underlying Linchpin, it is misleading. People don't know what a wiki is good for in a company.

There are much better aspects to highlight, that will help you and your managers understand the advantages of Linchpin faster.

Linchpin is personalization

One of the advantages of Linchpin is its full personalization. This is especially interesting if you have more than 500 employees.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by a stream of news that is rarely relevant. If employees check the news regularly and find that most articles have nothing to do with their daily work, they will learn to ignore the news completely. Do you read the New York Times? In my opinion, it's one of the best papers in the world. Professional editing, lots of research and highly independent. Probably one of the most trustworthy sources of information today. But still: You don't read it. I am a subscriber, but I just browse through the headlines sent as push notifications to my phone.

Relevance is the key. If you live in Germany like me, U.S. politics is too far away from my life. How would you feel about an intranet that only offers news items relevant to you? Linchpin does that without any extra effort. When you create a news article you simply select the channel where it should be published: Only for employees in Germany? Or Washington? All marketing employees? IT announcements for everyone in New York? No problems! It's easy to configure news articles to be delivered only to your target group.

Select a channel for your personalized news. Easy peasy.

Personalization dramatically increases awareness of news in your intranet.

Linchpin boosts awareness of intranet news in a wiki

One of a Confluence intranet's advantages is that it gets a lot of activity and attention. I admit that a lot of companies do not turn Confluence into the active and effective melting pot of content it could be. But there is a relatively simple solution to this: If you don't understand how to leverage such an awesome collaborative solution internally, please don't throw a 'one size fits all' intranet at them. It'll be a disaster.

Confluence, even when used only by a fraction of your company's employees, quickly becomes one of the most regularly and intensively used software systems in your infrastructure.

If your company is using Confluence, there is often no other place where news articles could live and get so much attention. Basically, Linchpin gets rid of the static Confluence homepage and provides your employees with a personalized dashboard. It's easy for Confluence users to get used to because this dashboard can still have all the features of the standard Confluence dashboard they have always used. But Linchpin adds the ability to display (personalized and relevant) news articles, right where employees will actually see (and read) them.

This is what an intranet is all about: Reaching all employees and raising awareness of corporate news.

Confluence supports this. This is not about the wiki functionality. Don't think of Linchpin as a wiki add-on. Linchpin integrates personalized news into an active and useful platform, which just so happens to be a wiki.

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Further information

Linchpin - social intranet based on Confluence
News from our Confluence and Linchpin development teams
Linchpin and the central Linchpin components are now Confluence Data Center compatible
Linchpin Mobile: Take your Confluence intranet to the next level