We finally rolled out the next stage. While past Tuesday 18th, our guys were presenting Knowledge Plaza at the San Francisco New Tech (upcoming post with pics and -hopefully- vids), we launched the new website. But what’s more important: Knowledge Plaza comes out of private beta to help anyone needing a powerful collaborative information sharing tool for their own projects or SMEs.

Now there are 2 solutions:

• Knowledge Plaza: for professionals and small/medium enterprises (software as a service).
• Knowledge Plaza Enterprise: for big companies (on premise).

Our pricing plans

There are different plans, starting as of 35€/mo, depending on your needs in terms of information storage and numbers of users. Tiles are the name we give to each shared item on your Plaza, whether a website, doc, video, pic, vcard, mosaic (wiki), etc. So, we’d recommend you to evaluate first what you and/or your business is going to need so that you experience this collaborative app to the fullest.

If you want to find out while testing it, we’ll be glad to help throughout the trial period.

Is there a free trial? Sure, there is. There’s a 30 day trial gratis.

So, please make some (big) room for (NOT) yet another new app on the block.

Related posts:

1. Knowledge Plaza presentation at Betagroup
2. Knowledge Plaza vs. Diigo: more than social web annotation
3. Knowledge Plaza wins the KM Forum innovation prize in Paris

How many enterprise 2.0 apps have you tried so far? How many were out of sheer curiosity and how many out of a specific need or problem to be solved? One of my favorite tips is: Just try when there’s a purpose or a pain to relieve, if there isn’t any, go ahead but be lenient with judgement based on serendipity.

Most -to my knowledge- enterprise 2.0 apps have one thing in common: they’re targeting work depending collaboration and sharing, building community because, as Prusak put it, “one of the great achievements of the knowledge movement was to get the fact acknowledged that human beings individually, in organizations, is not the unit of analysis for knowledge. This is a big step forward. And it goes against Microsoft and IBM and firms that try to push that individualistic viewpoint, because they are selling individualized technology. They think that’s the right unit. They’re wrong. The right unit for managing knowledge in organizations is the group. It’s not an individual. Individuals don’t do much. The smartest ones don’t. The stupidest ones don’t. They group together and form a common mean”. Well, enterprise 2.0 fortunately seems to be getting that, and that’s what we are struggling for.

So, my first advice related to this is: never try a collaborative app on your own. What’s the purpose, really?

Before trying an enterprise 2.0 collaborative app, take the following steps (and give serendipity just a 5-10% of the whole experience):

• Clearly define your purpose (What): To connect coworkers around shared targets and topics, to give our partners a way to collaborate on our projects, to monitor and analyze competition, etc.
• Clearly define your intention (Why): We want to increase sales, we want to be better than our competitors, we want to gain visibility, we want to fuel internal -or open- innovation, etc.
• Clearly define your timing (When): How many hours will you and colleagues be able to dedicate to fully test the experience?
• Clearly define your procedure (How): Here you can decide how you are going to face the collaboration, whether setting up groups, deciding topics or projects to work on, identifying champions to collaborate on this, set a checklist of features, identify support channels, etc.

But, again, plain and simple: only try collaborative apps by inviting more users (with a predesigned purpose and strategy).

To me, in enterprise 2.0: One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.

UPDATE 10/05/10:

• I’d recommend you to read B. Duperrin’s “Are you piloting or experimenting?“

No related posts.

I like re-reading Larry Prusak’s talk on ‘Knowledge Management’, that you can read here. I enjoy his concise and frank view on knowledge, communities, collaboration: no long-winded subterfuges and painfully logical.

There are many quotes from this talk on my notepad, but I really like this one:

If you give people enough time, enough space, and enough technology perhaps, they will self-organize into communities and self-interest groups, You don’t have to force the issue. They will find it each other. And talk to each other. You don’t have to worry too much about incentive issues. It’s about sharing. Some of the issues that you people raised in the first hour are perennial issues. My own feeling is that if something hasn’t been solved in a hundred years of trying, give it up. Don’t do it! There are a number of things you could give up too.
Last week I gave a talk, and a woman said to me, “I’ve been trying to make progress with knowledge for eight years at my firm, but no one cares.”
I said to her: “Get a different job!” You’re crazy to do stuff when nobody cares. I mean, it’s just nuts.

You know, it reminds me of the adoption vs. embracement dichotomy. It is also a common situation in community managing.

So, what’s left to do then? Do you agree with Prusak?

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