TinkerX

If you’re looking for really cheap, really easy, and really useful way to do an intranet for your firm, I’d suggest setting up an internal wiki. If you haven’t heard of wiki, don’t despair, it’s another neat new web-based communications tool. Remember when we hadn’t heard of blogs? I think that was last year, wasn’t it? Anyway, a wiki is a multi-user, text/HTML-based system for displaying and editing group accessed information. Perfect for intranets.

Here’s the great news: many wiki apps are being produced as freeware within the open-code movement. One such is TWiki, available at www.twiki.org. I make no claims about its useability, stability, etc, but they have success stories posted from British Telecom, Disney and some other pretty big outfits.

I use a personal, notepad wiki myself for making outline/background notes for many of my writing products. That program is called wikidPad and is available (free trial download, purchase for $12) at http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/. It’s a very neat program that lets you create linked, nested notes pages on the fly. WikidPad is not fancy, no great formatting options, no real bells and whistles… but once you start using it… you’ll be hooked.

If you’re interested in one of the oldest and largest wiki, see the Wikipedia, and the history of wiki is available here.

By the way (and this is a lead-in to some modestly self-serving tripe, yet it is relevant, I promise), the nexus of legal technology and marketing is something that I have been exploring in a monthly column on the excellent website www.llrx.com. Edited by the brilliant and overworked Sabrina Pacifici, the site has loads of good info about law firm tech. She asked me to write a column about where her world and mine collide. What fun! If you’re a glutton for Havens (and, really, who isn’t?), click here for a list of my past LLRX articles.