Powerful team collaboration using wikis

We have been using wikis for several years at Macadamian. After looking at a few options we decided to go with Atlassian's Confluence and are quite happy with it. It is not uncommon for customer's to tell us that they are more informed about what is happening within their Macadamian team that they are about their internal team.

What we do and how we do it with Confluence is partly responsible for this.

A recent verison upgrade has brought to my attention two plugins that are key in getting the most out of such a collaboration tools. Here what they are. Maybe your wiki provides similar functionality, if not let me know I can help. Macadamian is an Atlassian's partner.

Most visited page.
{popular:timespan=30d|events=create,view,update|
max=10|space=msp|types=page}

This provides you with the most frequently visited pages. In the context where your project assets are stored in your wiki. These pages are likely hot topics in your project.

Search
{livesearch:spaceKey=MSP}

Unless you are stuck in the 90' chances are that you are not browsing the web but searching it. This simple macro does this nicely for you, allowing to narrow the search to a particular space/project.

Last but not least, a wiki that offers the ability to create RSS feeds is very powerful. If your people do not like to go to your project home page to digg out recent changes, promote the usage of RSS feed.

The idea is that people will converge on your collaboration platform if there is something in it for them. If used properly, any project team member should find important project resources in the project wiki.

Oh, and finaly, do not neglect to train your people!