Like Dylan's organisation, we also use the excellent Confluence wiki. I wrote an article about why this is better approach called Wiki is my word-processor, which should give you some reasons to change the situation.
Benefits of using a wiki for internal documentation include the following.
- Word-processor users get sucked into changing the layout and typography, however good your templates are, which wastes time and reduces consistency.
- A wiki provides full-text search, which you are unlikely to have for your body of the MS Word documents written by everyone.
- A wiki provides a document version history; I have never heard of a team successfully keeping all revisions in Word documents and always being able to compare old versions, or using a version control system (with the possible exception of SharePoint but that's whole different failure scenario).
- A wiki makes hyperlinks between documents easy; it is too hard to reliably link between documents in a collection of Word documents, so new documents end up duplicating older content into new monolithic documents which means they take more time to read and write.
- Separate wiki pages can be edited by different people at the same time, and Confluence can merge changes when multiple people edit the same page at the same time; collaboration is harder with a Word document that only one person can edit at a time.
- A wiki like Confluence automatically generates navigation pages based on wiki structure and tags; you need a librarian and lots of discipline to make it possible to browse a large collection of Word documents.
- A wiki page usually loads and displays more quickly than a Word document.
- A wiki page has more automatic meta-data; you need templates and discipline to make sure that Word documents always have Title, Author and Version set in the document properties and visible in the document on-screen and in print.
If you want more ammunition than this, then there is lots of wiki-promotion on The Atlassian Blog.
