When Matthew Schultz started at iCrossing in February, a digital marketing firm, he realized his company had a knowledge management challenge. As the company expanded through acquisition, there wasn't a fundamental method or technology to harness institutional knowledge.

"We're adding not only products, but we were growing in people and the knowledge they bring," says Schultz, the company's VP of technology. "We needed a way to put all this knowledge in one location."

The existing corporate intranet was typical: a phone directory, a few uploaded corporate documents, and no way to update it without getting help from the IT department, which was consumed with running critical corporate applications.

"IT wants to help, but they can only do so much," Schultz says. "We needed something that was not only for the employees, but by the employees. I wanted us to build a wikipedia for the company and I wanted to make it the reference point for iCrossing's knowledge."

He needed to buy a wiki, a technology that allows users to update web pages often with no programming experience or knowledge of HTML code. He chose Socialtext, the Palo Alto company that made its mark selling wikis to enterprises and has since added corporate social networking profiles and a microblogging tool (a Twitter for the enterprise) to its portfolio.

While many wiki companies started out in the consumer space by offering free wikis supported by ad models during the height of the Web 2.0 era, Socialtext has made its business on selling wikis to businesses, something Schultz found attractive when he shopped around.

Like many wikis, Socialtext has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor instead of requiring users to code HTML.

"That was attractive to me," Schultz says. "The software also doesn't have too many bells and whistles, which I actually think is a good thing. We wanted the barrier of entry to be as low as possible."

The Socialtext WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor. Matthew Schultz, VP of technology at iCrossing, says it has made it easy for users to start using a wiki right away.

Socialtext will offer their product as a hosted service or on-premise in a hybrid model, where the customer purchases a Socialtext appliance while Socialtext handles all the support for the wiki. Schultz and iCrossing opted for the latter.