[jdrols]

>So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny.

This is completely false in my experience.

1) Businesses use wikis all the time. The last 4 places I've worked at have had department wikis. This includes a University, a Mega-Bank, a family owned e-tailer, and a medium-sized consulting firm, which hits just about every size business you can have aside from "start-up".

2) Getting a wiki set up is trivial. For the large companies you request the IT side to give you a VM and an address on the intranet. For the small companies it's usually a spare box and an address on the intranet. It's dead simple.

Also I suspect you would be surprised at how much leeway managers have in choosing collaboration mediums. Email is the old standby, yes, but many managers will choose other ways to collaborate within their department. Most businesses have an IM server for internal chats as well.

[flogic]

I think that depends very much on which large company. Where I work, getting a wiki setup on a machine I don't control would be an absolute nightmare. We're talking conference calls, forms, requirements docs, project numbers, discussions over funding, etc... It would be horrible. It took us 2 years just to get new servers.