Group Bookmarking and Knowledge Management

An interesting and very relevant topic of discussion arose in the office the other day, that of the most effective method of sharing of informative links and URL’s amongst ourselves and being able to do so without clutter, with respect to organisation for different departments, skillsets and interests  and overall, with ease of access.

Some quick online searches returned quite a number of bespoke ‘Social Bookmarking‘ and ‘Group Bookmarking’  options, although having followed to testing a portion of them, we found them to be generally below par with only one or two almost weighing up to our needs.

Two of the closest matches we found were http://www.diigo.com and http://www.bookmarkg.com. Diigo, the closest match, had a quick and painless sign up and a simple one click browser toolbar install instruction. After this you enter the dashboard of your own profile and are given the option to start bookmarking content. You can also create a group page and invite others, which is our requirement, so we did.  A nice feature of diigo is that you can add comments to any bookmarked content, however our major issue with it was that unlike on your personal profile where you can create ‘Lists’ (folders) – inside a group you cannot. This will invariably lead to a clutter of content over time and thus led us to conclude that diigo was not the solution for us. You can however assign tags to new entries, but we found the search function not to be 100% reliable also.

BookmarkG looked good on the surface also with a clean design and concise functionality. However upon further exploration we found it was seemingly very early days for this utility, with a skeleton like functionality, operating in its beta stage.  Like diigo, it also failed to provide a way to organise categories within a group page. Perhaps with that option added in, and some more testing to iron out the bugs before the rollout, this could be one to keep an eye on.

We then had a brainwave. Since we use Gmail as a business mail service, we all invariably have a Google+ account already setup. In G+ it is possible to set up a Community (Google+ Communities link?). A private Community is a private page, almost like a Facebook event page, but different in that if the options are set, it can’t be found by searches or accessed by anyone without an invite.  Importantly, in the settings tab as an admin, we can add categories in which we can share links to discuss specific issues with respect to the topics to which they fall under.

Our problem is solved. We now have a private interlinked timeline based discussion board, categorized and organised so that our developers are not having to sift through information on SEO whilst looking for article solutions on PHP and our online strategy resources are kept separate from our Content Management System’s archive etc.

Worth considering for your business.

– Stephen at enhance.ie