Hi all,

Our small-ish company is looking for a decent way to collaborate over the internet. We want to share technical information between a number of locations, and either have this completely open to anyone, or possibly to restrict this information. It has to be pretty easy to add new content and edit stuff.. I’m pretty sure we need a wiki for this, but can’t seem to find a good one. We’re playing with FlexWiki at the moment, and while its pretty good, its UI and navigation are not exactly what we want – we’re after something slightly more structured, with a contents page of sorts….

Does anyone use any wiki’s that they might recommend for the job? Or is some other tool the way to go?

Thanks guys!

Matt.

Sounds like you want to look into Sharepoint from Microsoft.

I just had my offshore group set up a Sharepoint site for us to use to do exactly this. The discussion board feature seems pretty weak.

hehe, actually, dot net nuke 3 combined with the speerio file manager pro and the latest news group module would be a really cheap and effective solution.

thats what i would do, plus sharepoint is an andministrative nightmare and a resource hog IMO.

Sharepoint is pretty slick! I just got a win2k3 SBS 2003 box, and i really like it. Everything is so integrated with it.

Btw...sharepoint services which should be plenty good enough ( its what comes with sbs 2003) can be downloaded for free from MS so its def cheap

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint i believe, i am writing that off top of my head.

You might want to look at some of the various cms systems out there, i especially like mambo.

Have a look at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ for a comparison of more cms systems than you can shake a stick at!

Thanks all.

We've got sharepoint here, although its not actually set up to do anything at the moment. From my limited 10 min introduction to it, I quite liked it, and it seemed to do pretty much everything you could ever want... the only thing about it is that unless I missed something, you store the "content" as word documents and store them in sharepoint. We want a very dynamic really easy to change system, which is why I was thinking wiki's - you just double click a page, save it, and voila! But wikis have their own problems, the fact they're very "open" being one....

I'll take a look at the CMS site and revisit dot net nuke....

We've actually got SharePoint at my day job running as our public facing internet/extranet site (a bit of a hack) but also use a separate installation for the company intranet.

SharePoint on the intranet is mainly used by the different teams to create their own areas, calendars, documentation repositories, etc. We've got 1200+ people and several companies working under one big virtual company umbrella. SPS 2003 is nice especially if you are using Office 2003. Integration with InfoPath is really slick if you are into capturing information from forms.

We then have a Documentum installation that is used for storing CMMI required documentation. It is web-based and has version control/history but is annoying to use. Very hierarchical and a little slow to navigate through.

Now, there is an effort to bring all the technical documentation up to date (system has been around 20+ years) and the initial proposal was to create Word + Visio documents and store them in the Documentum repository. This essentially equated to shelf-ware that would never get used. SharePoint was suggested but even it has some obstacles to being a really good documentation tool.

I proposed using a wiki for the documentation and got MediaWiki up and running on Apache + MySQL + PHP in a day or so having very limited experience with any of them. Everybody has so far bought into the concept of wiki, but we still have another layer or two of management to get through before we can officially begin. We do have nice little proof-of-concept site going though.

I like MediaWiki because it is mature, runs WikiPedia, actively maintained and enhanced and has lots of really nice features like History and Talk pages. It took a little convincing to go the non-Microsoft route, but the only real ASP.Net option is FlexWiki but it just isn't quite there yet (although I do use it in my after-hours endeavours).

Matt