This is the fourth of eight posts on the recent Unicom conference “Social Tools for Business Use: Web 2.0 and the new participatory cultures”.

By Ruth Ward, Allen & Overy 

The focus of Ruth Ward’s presentation was on simplicity and practicality.

Very interestingly, Ruth mentioned that her first experience of social tools was in the business context of the knowledge management project about which she had been invited to talk.

She described Blogs in the context of a place for “Latest Discussions” within a particular practice group.

The template for each Blog was very simple.

Search within each group Blog is by Category, Theme or Date.

Categories are set by the principal owners of the Blog.

Themes are set by the individual contributors to the Blog, but the Blog owners can go in and add additional Themes.

Wikis as a term was not initially used by the law firm, for fear of scaring users off.  Instead the simple term Group Space was used.

Wikis are used for various purposes, not only in the Wikipedia sense, but also, for example, project management, questionnaires, surveys and training sessions.

In Ruth's opinion, this project (which is still continuing) has been the best success story within the firm for a knowledge management project (she has been at the firm for the last 7 years).