5 Great Tools To Share Knowledge In a Team

Sharing knowledge in a team is one of the important factors of success of all its members and the company as a whole. What it can be? Any sorts of things: articles, videos, slides, thoughts on a particular tool - generally, any piece of useful information that you would like to share with your colleagues.

And that’s why it’s important:

  1. Each member of the team is growing as a professional;
  2. You communicate with each other (this is especially important for distributed teams);
  3. The senior colleagues share their experience with the younger ones (by posting links to useful books or other materials and discussing certain decisions they’ve made in comments).

Specially for you guys, I picked the 5 best tools to help you put your team back on track.

1. Yammer

Perhaps the most popular solution on the market, which is used by well-known companies including eBay, Xerox and Sharp. This is a real corporate network with groups (both public and private), ability to create events and conduct polls. It is perfect for sharing knowledge. For those who do not want to go to the site itself, there is a weekly newsletter. Some do not like its appearance. Well, there are other options.

Price: free for basic usage Platforms: Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone Link: Site

2. Send To Inc

A great tool for sharing links, notes and files. Groups, easy addition of resources, robust search, and opportunity to discuss - almost everything you need for knowledge sharing is in the Send To Inc.

Among the distinctive features worth mentioning integration with such services as Flowdock, Hipchat, Evernote, Basecamp, opportunity to respond to comments via email and markdown support. The only thing that upsets - it is impossible to change the activity digest schedule (either once a day, or none).

Price: free for 3 users (other plans starting from $19/mo) Platforms: Web, Mac OS X Link: Site

3. Monocle

If you are looking for something really simple and self-hosted, then you might like the following app - https://github.com/maccman/monocle. It have a minimalistic interface - news on the left, and the current article and its discussion on the right.

Price: free Platforms: Web only Link: Github repo

4. Discourse

Discourse - powerful forum with many features, including real time notification, wiki-pages, suggested topics and others. Better yet, it is 100% open-source. You can setup it on your server or buy a cloud version (though it seems to me quite expensive). Using wiki pages feature, you can for example create a knowledge base, which will be used to store must read resources.

Price: free if self-hosted / monthly-paid (starting from $200/mo) if cloud-hosted Platforms: Web only Link: Site

5. Google+ Private Community

If you’re already using Google+, a private community may satisfy your needs. Yes, it is only one group and one feed, but nice interface, applications for all popular platforms and most of the features discussed above may induce many. I especially liked the auto tagging feature - when you post an article, Google sets the tags for you. This allow you to categorize information and find it quickly in the future.

The same can be applied to Facebook.

Price: free Platforms: Web, iOS, Android Link: Site

Which is used in your company? What do you think about it?

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