We are reviewing some different options for multi team wiki pages within our organization. We need to be able to organize the following for teams:

Calendaring, contacts, meeting minutes, upload documents (ppt, xls, ect)

Also, each of these teams consists of experts in certain technology subjects, and we would like to be able to allow team members to share tips and advice for troubleshooting different products in an organized fashion that would allow employees on other teams to be able to access this knowledgebase effectively.


Currently we are reviewing mediawiki and confluence( http://www.atlassian.com/wiki/?clicked=footer ), but are open to other options if something else stands out. (self hosted options only)

Anyone have any good ideas, experience with these platforms, tips, tricks, MUST HAVE addons, ect??

5/17/2007 2:45:40 PM

Incidentally, I'm working on a similar project

5/17/2007 4:55:18 PM

Microsoft Sharepoint Server

5/17/2007 4:56:33 PM

^^ yup .... figured if our ole tdub friends could help us out some.

5/17/2007 7:39:23 PM

So really, anyone ever used either for a team environment?

[Edited on May 17, 2007 at 8:20 PM. Reason : .]

5/17/2007 8:20:06 PM

Quote :

"Microsoft Sharepoint "

5/19/2007 2:26:09 AM

It sounds like what you're wanting to do is pretty complex, and one of the commercial packages might work best for you... I probably won't be able to tell you much about the software, but can tell you that your site has a huge potential of being very successful.

I actually "run" my own Wiki site at work, which stemmed as a result of the need for my colleagues and me to share the findings of our research, and allow us to easily build on the content of the site as opposed to the design. We decided about doing this as opposed to sending out our documents through email, or setting up a site that linked to our individual PDF reports, etc.

This internal Wiki was eventually opened up to the entire company by the request of corporate just to let other employees not involved in R&D to see what kind of research the company is doing, and we got dozens of emails from people saying it sounded very interesting, just they didn't really understand some of the basic terms we were using.

We then spent a good amount of time creating another section of the Wiki, which covers the basic of power, and how everything works on a very simplistic level, so even those who never have had a EE course could try and follow what we're doing.

As time went on, some of the other engineers (although not asked to), decided to expand on what we did and begin to make changes and create their own pages, further explaining things. Some of the other employees also set up Q&A pages, asking various questions and over the past year, the site has become a huge resource of information, and has, at times, used more frequently than the knowledgebase site the company has. It started out running off of one of our personal workstations, and the demand became so large, it had to be put on a machine in one of their datacenters.

The point is, the whole concept of the online collaboration tools is something that can really be useful to people if it's setup right and easy to use for those who may not be tech savvy.

As for the software, we thought about using MediaWiki, just because it's probably the most famous 'free' one, but the wiki markup was a little complex, and not very intuitive (at first glance). We decided on using Dokuwiki, another free, smaller wiki software package whose markup was very simple, which I think actually helped with the success of the site once the non-technical people in the company figured out how to interact with us through the site. It also has support for plugins, which we use religiously, especially the LaTeX equation one, which allows us to copy/paste equations directly from our reports and publications, and let the wiki engine process the equations into images.

5/19/2007 8:59:14 AM

Thanks for the info. Simplicity is the most important thing, as we need to make this accessible to people with a wide variety of web saavyness. We'll take a look at dokuWiki as well.

5/19/2007 9:15:59 AM

If your company can't afford a new commercial license, there's always Alfresco.

http://www.alfresco.com/

5/19/2007 9:16:38 AM

I'll also mention that Dokuwiki doesn't use a databse, but flat files. I know some claim that that can result in reduced performance. I can say this is true when they decided to open up the site to our tens of thousands of employees and when it was running off my aging personal workstation.

Once we got it up on one of the severs at one of the datacenters, I haven't noticed any degradation of performance and the volume is steady at several thousands of hits per day.

I also did some Googling around on Wikimatrix, and this might be a good thread to follow if you're interested in Sharepoint and Confluence:

http://www.wikimatrix.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=431&action=new

5/19/2007 9:21:45 AM

Quote :

"I think that a wiki system with document management features is much more usable than a system that does the reverse. People typically start with a project in an unstructured way (the wiki way), and add structure over time. So, you have linked pages, and you attach files as needed. This is more intuitive and collaborative than a file tree where you store documents and add meta data to documents (comments etc.) I have seen that some large companies have an official policy to use SharePoint, but the employees push for a wiki and prefer to work in the wiki. Some companies settle on a policy where the wiki is used to create a document, and once it is "done" it is stored in SharePoint. This makes the IT folks and the users happy. TWiki:Codev/SharePointVsTWiki has some discussion on the SharePointWiki and TWiki. As a key distinction, the SharePoint wiki is not a Wikipedia:Structured_wiki. That is, users are stuck with the basic whiteboard feature of the wiki. They cannot create custom wiki applications to automate their work. "

I agree with this post. A Wiki SHOULD have document/content management features underneath it...makes life/administration/updating/migration, etc. that much easier. Definitely give Alfresco a shot.

5/19/2007 9:28:31 AM

we use doku wiki @ work (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki)

we have almost everything you have mentioned in there
-for a calendar, we embed a private/shared google calendar, if that is not secure enough, use a calendar script or something of the like (doku has lots of plugins)
-supports auth backends (ldap, mysql, etc) for your corp. directories

we like it because you can incorporate scripts pretty easily, i guess you can on all wiki's though

[Edited on May 19, 2007 at 3:25 PM. Reason : oh yeah, and best part is its GPL]

5/19/2007 3:19:54 PM