Team collaboration and communication increasingly power organizations, especially as businesses strive to squeeze each last drop of productivity and efficiency from an already stressed workforce. Keeping everyone on the same page, and up to date on organizational changes, project status and other events, often proves challenging. Simple Web portals (think Intranets) can help. One potential solution is already present on newer OS X servers. Yet, numerous firms struggle to properly leverage the existing intranet and portal technologies: OS X Server’s Wiki Server delivers a capable, integrated, and efficient intranet website capable of empowering an intranet portal.

It’s included

Potentially the greatest advantage of Wiki Server is the fact it’s included within OS X Server. No additional software, servers or licenses are required. Organizations that have standardized on Apple technologies and the OS X (and iOS) platforms can further leverage their investments by utilizing Wiki Server.

Many businesses are making collaboration and project management investments in local SharePoint deployments, hosted SharePoint initiatives, or Web-based tools such as Huddle, Basecamp, and Campfire. While different platforms all offer a variety of different features and capabilities, many Apple organizations may be pleasantly surprised to learn the many capabilities of the already-included Wiki Server platform.

It’s approachable

The second Wiki Server advantage is, similar to other Apple technologies, it’s easy to learn and operate. With little training users can get up to speed creating and editing pages, tag information, upload files (including images) and add comments, thoughts and additional information as required.

Administrators don’t need to be Wiki pros, either. Apple maintains a helpful manual published directly to its site.

It leverages existing Apple investments

Another Wiki Server advantage is the Web collaboration engine further leverages organizations’ existing Apple software and hardware investments. Whether the business has invested in Macs, Apple office productivity tools, and/or iPads, all of those solutions integrate well with Apple’s OS X-integrated communication and collaboration portal.

Wiki Server pages are browser-accessible, so end users need not install or configure additional applications. Users can simply direct their browsers (including Safari) to the Web location the organization’s administrator selects and begin collaborating.

Automatic email notifications can be configured to alert team members to newly posted files and information. WebDAV support is included, to iPad users can open and save Wiki attachments using Apple’s office productivity tools (Pages, Numbers and Keynote).

More information on Wiki Server can be found on Apple’s Web site within its OS X Server Product Overview PDF and OS X Server: Advanced Administration pages.