The old cliché that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover isn't the easiest thing to live. Malcolm Gladwell exposes in detail how the first impression can be very powerful in his book Blink: We are conditioned to make snap judgments about the world around us. It's our primary coping mechanism for the overwhelming amount of information that we're taking in every day.

It wouldn't be surprising to anyone that there are features in the SharePoint technology family that scream out that they are for consumer use and not for business. Looking quickly at wikis and blogs, as an example, it might be easy to conclude that they have no place in business. But that initial conclusion may be wrong. Think about the potential amount of business information your company loses each year due to turnover alone. It's practically a crime not to seek out ways to help capture and retain information that's being lost today. That's precisely what wikis and blogs can do for your organization.

Enter SharePoint

SharePoint certainly helps with the problem of sharing Microsoft Office documents among teams and making those documents more accessible through search. However, there's more to enterprise information that just the structured data captured in enterprise systems and Office documents.

How many critical pieces of information are kept only in private e-mail storage? How many critical pieces of information are never even written down? Even in my own work, I realize that I keep critical information in e-mail and on my personal hard drive. I consult with organizations to encourage people to share information and leverage tools to improve information retrieval, yet I'm not perfect, and I'm not alone.

One of the challenges for most people who continue to retain information in their own private data stores is that there's an effort -- a sometimes Herculean effort -- to get the information in a place where it can be used by others. Our goal as SharePoint experts has got to be to reduce the amount of effort necessary to get the information in the places where it is shareable.

Wiki what?

A few years ago while at an advanced training session for a product line that I work with, I met a man who asked if I knew of a good wiki tool to run side-by-side with SharePoint. When I asked why he wanted to run a wiki the only response was, "My boss wants it." There was no problem definition, there was no expected result, just a desire to try it. With the success of wikipedia (judged in both entries and Web hits), the idea of a wiki isn't a bad one.

A wiki is essentially a quick way to capture and connect information. Creating links between content in a wiki is simple and creating new content is equally simple. Key in the title of the topic you want as the link and if the content doesn't already exist, you'll be allowed to create it when you click on the link. It's cool to be sure but what is it good for?

The less-than-obvious answer is that it's a good kitchen "junk drawer." -- you know, the drawer in the kitchen that holds all of the stuff that didn't have a real home. But, because a wiki is searchable, it's substantially more useful than a kitchen junk drawer. A wiki becomes a place where you put information that doesn't have a good home elsewhere, or that you don't have time to convert into a more public facing document. It's a place for you to scratch out notes to yourself and your team mates who might already have some context for what you're working on and therefore don't need a complete document.

wikis are appearing in development teams that need to capture the knowledge developed while building some specific feature, but whose knowledge might be applicable to more than one person. For instance, it might contain information about a ThreadAborting exception (you get one when you do a Response.Redirect in an ASP.NET application and choose to end the response.) It might contain information about the type of object returned from an enumerator of a dictionary (typically a DictionaryEntry.)

Information like this might not be structured, and it may not be something that everyone needs, but it might save someone else hours of debugging. In short, wikis are great placeholders for the kernels of tacit information the team captures. With greater frequency, these sorts of entries are becoming useful to me as I forget how I solved a particular problem or dealt with a particular situation.