Beyond Quora: 9 Q&A Services for the Enterprise

We’ve discovered several more vendors since we first looked at the enterprise questions and answers space earlier this year. It’s a young market, but one that’s heating up quick. There are pure Q&A vendors like the ones we mentioned before, and several other social platforms have added Q&A features to existing products.

Here’s a look at nine companies that are trying to improve knowledge management through Q&A software.

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Pure Q&A Vendors

MindQuilt

MindQuilt is an early entrant in enterprise Q&A. Founder Daniel Kim says the company’s main competition is actually not any other product – it’s inaction. He says the company’s customers don’t ask about Opzi or Quora – instead the question MindQuilt is different from a wiki.

And how is it different from a wiki? Kim says that most non-technical users don’t know how to contribute to a wiki. Also, it’s difficult to create and change a wiki’s structure. MindQuilt, he says, provides an easy interface and a simple structure for knowledge sharing.

MindQuilt is promoting its routing features and game mechanics incentives key differentiators.

Opzi

Opzi is set to launch next month. According to founder Euwyn Poon, Opzi is moving towards wiki format that emphasizes knowledge management.

One thing the Opzi team is focusing on is how to harness users’ existing habits. There already a number of ways employees try to get their questions answer – such as asking the person sitting next to them or sending the question to a mailing list. Poon doesn’t think it’s a good idea to fight those ingrained habits. It will be interesting to see what the company comes up with.

Qhub

Qhub is less enterprise-focused than the other vendors on this list. It’s designed for business that want to build hosted Q&A sites. Typically, these will be public facing. It’s the Blogger or WordPress.com of Q&A sites, and is the sort of thing you’d add-on to an existing site or blog.

Some companies are using it for customer service, which puts it into competition with companies like GetSatisfaction and UserEcho, which both include a Q&A feature.

Next: Enterprise Products with Q&A Baked-In

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