Jan 20, 2009 -- "Top Ten Law Firms in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland Tap Interwoven to Support Growth, Global Competitiveness and Regulatory Compliance"
This article will explore ways in which Microsoft SharePoint wikis can provide the control and structure that legal professionals require, along with the benefits of open collaboration that wikis afford.
use SharePoint's built-in security to control who may create, edit and view wiki pages
Another built-in SharePoint feature is content approval. You can use this feature to have SharePoint notify an approver when new or edited content is submitted and require an approval prior to making the content generally available.
Alerts are another tool in your content control arsenal. Any wiki user may request an alert at the wiki or page level.
One aspect of SharePoint wikis that is not readily apparent is that each wiki page is a specially formatted Web-part page. As such, given the appropriate permissions, you can add your own Web parts to create a hybrid wiki page. At my firm we've used this trick, in conjunction with a custom workflow, to automatically add Web parts to each new wiki page as it is created
The adoption and use of wikis within law firms follows an evolutionary path from indifference to skepticism, to partial, then full adoption. The rate at which a firm moves along this adoption curve will depend both on how quickly legal professionals embrace the belief that collaborative authorship can efficiently produce high-quality reference materials, as well as how effectively technical professionals implement the tools for control and organization of the authorship process that lawyers demand.
The demonstration workspace shows how law firms can use PBworks Legal Edition to improve the efficiency of their practice areas, increase the productivity of both attorneys and staff, and provide greater client satisfaction.