Three Low-Cost/No-Cost Information-Hosting Solutions

Produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Companies sometimes struggle with organizing data to glean deeper insights into making the best decisions. Bethany Brown, Global KM Specialist at Resonance, examined three solutions that could help host information for organization at KMWorld 2022.

“This is a great way to utilize free or nominal cost platforms to host your information,” Brown said.

She explained that she was hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau for Resilience and Food Security to create a database because they needed a way to synthesize information on all their partnerships to better respond to requests to include information in communications. They operated using Google, so she was able to create a Google Sheet for the agency to organize this data.

“The agency wanted to create a catalog of examples where they could pull from a filter feature of examples to use,” Brown said. “They said ‘we need to know the story of our partnerships, the purpose behind them, the lessons learned.’”

SharePoint Lists is similar to Google Sheets and it recognizes unique values within a cell so companies can go deeper and work with metadata, she explained. However, it can take some getting used to.

“As a way to improve would be creating dashboards and better visualizations,” Brown said.

Smart Sheets is another tool that can be used to create more modern databases outside Microsoft or Google.

Save the Date for KMWorld 2023—November 6–9, 2023—JW Marriott | Washington, DC!