[StevieDvd]

Been looking into Wiki's for work usage and wondered if we had any die hard wiki users here?

If you are into them and have used one that scales up to a large number of users and pages which one do you use and did your try others?

Have three candidates I like:

Dekiwiki - pretty and user friendly
Mediawiki - bit more basic but hey its free and much used
Confluence - a commercial but seemingly robust one.

We have a healthy budget for all this so fire way with your suggestions.

Thanks

Steve

 

[pat1006]

Doesn't wikipedia use Mediawiki? I have used Mediawiki for some small scale things (20 users?) and it has worked very well.

 

[krmathis]

MediaWiki it is...

 

[StevieDvd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pat1006 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Doesn't wikipedia use Mediawiki? I have used Mediawiki for some small scale things (20 users?) and it has worked very well.

Yep wikipedia is based on Mediawiki which should mean that it will scale up OK, but it's a bit more basic than I'd like. I've already had to change the editor to the lovely named FCKEditor and added my own enhancements to that.

For a smaller wiki I'd probably go for the Dekiwiki (another variant from mediawiki or so I read). Looks more modern and friendly and I can buy support if required - but not sure if it will scale up to a heavy sized system.

The commercial one Confluence is as you'd expect targetted as users such as my company where stability & support take precedence over open source. Does have a large set of third party suppliers which gives a warm comfort factor - if it manages to keep them going it must be fairly good.

I'm only proofing the concept with each and getting my hands dirty in css and php (not my areas usually) but will get some proper coders on the case when required.

It's certainly been a bit of an eye opener just going through the sheer number of wiki systems available out there.

And the time taken to try out some of the extensions (not all work as stated and can be a pain to install)

Any suggestions still welcome.

 

[pat1006]

What is the purpose of the wiki? Does Confluence only provide support for setting up the wiki or support for users to train the users how to use it? It seems to me Dekiwiki has already been ruled out. I do agree that there are a lot of choice. Are there any others that you are looking at? I have only dealt with MediaWiki and phpWiki.

 

[Kilane]

The screwturn wiki isn't too bad, and it's opensource. I'll give you more insight when I actually finish building it and subject it to the 500 or so users it's going to have. Beyond that I have no real experience administrating anything but Perspective wiki, which is a mess.

 

[StevieDvd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pat1006 /img/forum/go_quote.gif What is the purpose of the wiki? Does Confluence only provide support for setting up the wiki or support for users to train the users how to use it? It seems to me Dekiwiki has already been ruled out. I do agree that there are a lot of choice. Are there any others that you are looking at? I have only dealt with MediaWiki and phpWiki.

The purpose of the wiki is twofold, one is to allow the editing of the documentations (an awful lot of it) directly - currently we author in Word and send out as Acrobat; the second is to allow a more uptodate look & feel with the cross wiki link referencing.

 

[StevieDvd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kilane /img/forum/go_quote.gif The screwturn wiki isn't too bad, and it's opensource. I'll give you more insight when I actually finish building it and subject it to the 500 or so users it's going to have. Beyond that I have no real experience administrating anything but Perspective wiki, which is a mess.

I'll have a peek at screwturn (and phpwiki per pat1006) before I get too far down the road with mediawiki or confluence.

Thanks

 

[pat1006]

I did not like phpwiki. I do not think it will suit your needs.

Maybe look into Central Desktop - Project collaboration, Team collaboration, Intranets, Wiki Software - Central Desktop though I have never worked with it.

 

[Kilane]

If you're looking to drop money and depending on your usage there's other options as well... MS sharepoint has a competent (though fairly useless for our purposes) wiki and shared document holding.

If you edit/publish in word that's probably the ideal solution as you can post shared documents direct to word format, if this is the primary purpose of the wiki I'd share sharepoint 2007 is ideal.

The main issues are going to be the weight of getting it up, some administrative overhead and probably some integration with other systems to really make use of features in sharepoint.

 

[StevieDvd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kilane /img/forum/go_quote.gif If you're looking to drop money and depending on your usage there's other options as well... MS sharepoint has a competent (though fairly useless for our purposes) wiki and shared document holding. If you edit/publish in word that's probably the ideal solution as you can post shared documents direct to word format, if this is the primary purpose of the wiki I'd share sharepoint 2007 is ideal. The main issues are going to be the weight of getting it up, some administrative overhead and probably some integration with other systems to really make use of features in sharepoint.

We already have Sharepoint in use for internal Knowledgebase but the wiki is for sending to clients as well. For various reasons we cannot make the wiki available on the web so may simply distribute it to clients as a free wiki or an offline web folder structure.

The wiki concept simply allows us to maintain the source and edit easily in house and avoids any conversions from Word to other formats(wiki, html, xml or whatever).

It looks like Mediawiki is likely to win but it also means I have a lot of work to do to get it configured as we want it and some work on the Word to wiki conversions. I've been through most of the publicly available Word macros for conversions but most of them still need tidying up and the odd quirks fixed.

Thanks for the feedback.

Steve