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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Wins Portal Excellence Award

 

WebKnowHow
Friday, January 5, 2007; 08:20 AM

Avenue A | Razorfish, the largest interactive marketing and technology services firm in the U.S. and an operating unit of aQuantive, Inc., is practicing what it preaches with its internal wiki, a proprietary employee-driven knowledge sharing portal for its 16 offices worldwide. The wiki was recently awarded a Portal Excellence Award at the Shared Insights Portal Conference in the ‘Best Team Collaboration Application’ category.

The award highlights applications that support internal and/or external facing team development and interaction. The Avenue A | Razorfish wiki was recognized for making use of innovative collaborative technologies like Web-based discussion groups.

Embracing the philosophy and structure of Wikipedia, the popular, collaborative encyclopedia that anyone can edit online, Avenue A | Razorfish turned the wiki into an internal knowledge sharing and project-based collaboration site for its seven business disciplines across the globe, including: analytics, strategy, enterprise solutions, technology, media, creative and user experience.

Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School commented via his blog (http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/), “I find that the sites I visit most often these days are ones that give me 'the latest.' They help me stay on top of the world, the blogosphere, and my personal network of people and content. This page does the same thing at the company level for Avenue A | Razorfish employees."

The spirit and culture at Avenue A | Razorfish is entrepreneurial and collaborative, which allows employees to share ideas and best practices with other employees around the globe. Whether it is information derived from sample project work, research resources or new ideas, the wiki provides an easy-to-use tool for people to find resources and to spread ideas beyond smaller teams to facilitate an open dialogue. It satisfies the social networking needs of a fast-growing corporation by allowing employees to connect on a more personal level via “people pages” and community-specific content, rather than the typical content found on corporate intranets. For an added level of security, the site is password-protected and resides behind the company’s firewall.

Created in January 2006, the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki includes a home page and a ‘guidelines and tips’ section where members can access insight on how to edit the wiki and use templates for creating information. The wiki utilizes many innovative features, including:

  • Tag cloud – organizes and bookmarks Web sites for future visits
  • Mapping – guides people to subjects related to their search queries
  • Blogs – online diary postings for each discipline area
  • Page templates – existing forms for employees to help simplify posting content
  • Photos and bios – similar to those on the Facebook social network site
  • Google maps can be added to any page
  • Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds
  • User ratings.

Unlike traditional Web-based discussion forums, the blogs can be integrated with email distribution lists to foster an open dialogue. The wiki also feeds in other popular user-generated pages from the Web, including Digg, a news community; Flickr, a photo sharing site and del.iciou.us, a social bookmarking Web site.

”Our best ideas percolate from small project teams,” said Ray Velez, vice president and National Lead, Technology at Avenue A | Razorfish. “The wiki is the perfect tool for our people to share their ideas and collaborate with teams across all of our 16 offices. Because the wiki is dynamic, and is constantly changing, we’ve found that it bypasses the issue of driving contribution because people want to keep the content fresh. By integrating and indexing our heavily trafficked mailing lists we are starting to mine the great content sitting in employee’s email boxes. This benefits all of our people, not just a few.”

To build and create content, the company uses free, open source software from MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia. The blogs are powered by WordPress, a common blog platform and Avenue A | Razorfish also integrated the software with its internal Microsoft Active Directory to ensure the site is safe and complies with security standards.

To share best practices related to enterprise corporations, Avenue A | Razorfish released in July 2006 the“Corporate Intranets Best Practices Report: A User-Driven Web 2.0 Perspective.” The full report is available at: www.avenuearazorfish.com/enterprisesolutions/. A wiki-based version of the report is also available on The Workplace blog (www.theworkplaceblog.com), which was designed by the Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions practice to help readers keep pace with the news, trends, commentary and events affecting the enterprise workplace and corporate intranets.

About the Shared Insights’ Portal Excellence Awards

For more than eight years, the Shared Insights’ Portal Excellence Awards have recognized world class implementations that provide significant business benefits and exploit innovative technology. Leading analysts, consultants and editors judge the entries in four award categories, including Best Team Collaboration Application, Best Employee Portal, Best Customer or Partner Portal and the Best Content Management Application. For more information visit: www.sharedinsights.com.

About Avenue A | Razorfish

Avenue A | Razorfish (www.avenuea-razorfish.com) is the largest interactive marketing and technology services firm in the U.S., and an operating unit of Seattle-based aQuantive, Inc. (NASDAQ:AQNT). Avenue A | Razorfish solutions are entrenched in deep technology, rigorous analytics and a rich understanding of customer needs, including award-winning web media and creative, search marketing services, email marketing/eCRM, and world-class creative, design and implementation of customer Web sites, intranets and extranets. Avenue A | Razorfish operates three U.S. regions – East, West and Central – with offices located in major U.S. markets, the U.K., Australia, Germany and China. Clients include AstraZeneca, Best Buy, Disney, Kraft, Microsoft and Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

In the company name Avenue A | Razorfish noted in this news release, a pipe symbol appears between Avenue A and Razorfish. This symbol may not appear properly in some systems.

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