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News
posted 11 Sep 2006
Social networking
Gas supplier BOC rolls out wikis for knowledge capture
By Jessica Twentyman
Industrial gas supplier The BOC Group has implemented wiki software as a means of tapping the knowledge that resides within its global employee base of some 43,500 staff.
“The wiki approach has improved collaboration among geographically dispersed groups within BOC. In fact it’s been so well received that it’s becoming an integral part of our knowledge capture and transfer processes,” said BOC knowledge manager John Hobday.
The wiki provides a user-friendly interface for both contributing and tracking information and has been rolled out in partnership with systems integration company Sirius. The technology behind the wiki, a product called MediaWiki, is based on open source software (including PHP and MySQL). As such, BOC has not paid upfront licence fees to a software vendor, nor will it be required to pay for ongoing support and maintenance.
“Beyond the obvious commercial benefits, we liked MediaWiki because we could make changes to the source code to suit our business needs. MediaWiki is now available to our offices around the world via our corporate intranet,” said Joann Butler, head of information management services at BOC.
