As a growing company, our wiki is starting to really pull its weight and facilitate collaboration - here's some things I've noticed recently...
Forums
Add forums to your wiki - whether they are in a staff intranet, customer extranet or public parts of the wiki, they encourage collaboration on a whole new level.
Some of our new recruits (Sandra O'Donovan and Emma Rush) have started a "Help! Newbie Questions" forum in our staff intranet - an excellent idea!
It's going to quickly become a key resource for new staff members, getting them used to the wiki from their very first day at Adaptavist.
The topics cover things that more established members of staff would never think about - eg. "How should we answer support tickets in JIRA" or "What skills to staff have", etc.
It's a perfect example of people taking over part of the wiki for their own needs and by the very nature of questions asked it also pulls in more experienced members of staff to answer them - instant collaboration between new and existing members of staff, awesome!
If you've not got a "newbie questions" forum in your staff intranet, ask your next recruit to set one up, it's a superb resource!
Targeted Spaces
When we first started using a wiki for our website, everything was in one space. We then added a private space for our staff intranet and a public space for our user guides, however over the years we've realised the value of having a space for each distinct thing - be it a public space for a product or service, extranet's for customer projects, or staff intranets for various departments, it really helps, and here's why...
If you have too few spaces, it's difficult to find stuff - you end up with a completely random mixture of stuff thrown in to one place.
By having dedicated spaces for various things, you instantly say "this is where everything relating to X lives" and people interested in whatever "X" is congregate there which in turn facilitates discussions and collaboration.
We've recently been reorganising our entire site this way (apologies for any navigation issues caused, we'll have those sorted our pretty soon!) and it's already working like a charm.
Intranet Spaces
Any space with "Intranet" in it's title is staff only - to be seen only by Adaptavist staff. Knowing that only Adaptavist staff can see and contribute to the space, discussions can be far more frank/blunt, fun, etc., making such spaces super productive.
Examples of our intranet spaces:
- Marketing Intranet
- Accounts Intranet
- Staff Intranet
- Developer Intranet
Each intranet becomes the hub of activity for that area of the business - it means that if I'm interested in one area of the business (ok, I'm the boss so I'm interested in them all!) then you can watch it's space and get a constant feed of activity for that area of the business.
When we used to just have one intranet space, you'd get all kinds of email notifications about things that you often weren't interested in.
It should be noted that not all staff have access to all intranet spaces - some spaces contain confidential information and are restricted to specific people that need to work with that information.
By setting up user groups in Confluence (or in our case, Atlassian's Crowd software) it becomes easier to manage access rights throughout the site.
Extranet Spaces
Any space with "Extranet" in it's title indicates that although the space is not publicly accessible, specific people outside Adaptavist are able to access it.
There are generally four types of extranet in use by Adaptavist:
- Specific customer projects - a wiki space is a great way to collaborate on larger projects, but it's always accompanied by tickets in JIRA (again, sometimes in a client or project specific area) to keep track of deliverables and issues.
- Resellers and partners - or competitors in any other industry! Adaptavist has a long history of working closely with "competitors" and we often share code and ideas with them and regularly direct customers to them if we think they can fulfil the customers' needs better than we can.
- "Run Books" - this is a fairly recent development and probably merits a blog post in it's own right. A run book is basically a set of procedures usually specific to one project or system.
- Company planning - Adaptavist are increasingly collaborating with industry professionals with a view to making our business better and planning for the future and these spaces make it far easier to collaborate whilst retaining information.
We've realised that customer extranets are an excellent way to collaborate on larger documents - such as legal contracts and technical specifications. Because Confluence tracks changes, and allows deletions and insertions to be marked up within content, we can easily keep track of changes and updates.
Company planning extranets have shown us just how useful a wiki is at capturing tacit knowledge - for example, we'll be discussing things with our lawyer or business advisor in a forum within the extranet and they'll mention things that we would never have thought of. Such things are instantly captured so we can see how business decisions or clauses in contracts were arrived at, and because of email notifications that knowledge is automatically distributed out to other members of staff.
Public Spaces
As I mentioned earlier, we're creating a space for every single product and service that our company offers. The best example to date is our Theme Builder community which is an absolute hive of activity.
By having tabbed navigation down the side, it makes it easy for people to find the section of the space they are interested in, be it forums, tutorials, support, documentation, etc.
When you search in a community space, the search is automatically restricted to that space by default (you can easily widen the search using the options on the search results page) so you're more likely to find what it is you're looking for.
As more and more of our Theme Builder customers (and there are lots!) find out about that space, the community surrounding the product grows and becomes more active.
The forums are already proving to be a success - if we answer a common question in the forums, it instantly reduces the workload of our support staff (which is everyone in the company) because future support tickets can just be directed to a URL. Because our support system is secured, you can't search for solutions in tickets created by other people or organisations - our forum enables useful information like that to be brought out in to the public where it can be searched and commented on by anyone.
Recently, we've even had customers providing additional documentation - for a long time we'd been wondering how to depict all 800+ icons that come with Theme Builder until suddenly a customer uploaded a ready made solution 
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