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How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

11 points by sam ↗ HN
I'm looking for some open source wiki software to do internal documentation for software, hardware, procedures, etc.

A google search for "open source enterprise wiki" returns Twiki and Socialtext. I also stumbled upon TeamPage. I poked around with Socialtext and I like that is a hosted solution (less admin and maintenance for us). Has anyone used any of these offerings or does anyone have any other suggestions?

27 comments

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cscott
We've implemented plain old MediaWiki in our division. It serves as a document and guidance distribution point to the wider corporate public, as well as an scratch pad for internal procedures and process. Due to the general lack of fine-grained access control and segmentation, we stood up two instances: one for the "public" site without authentication for read-only access (and mediawiki accounts for division members only to edit content) and another one for the "private" site with HTTP authentication for the wiki root.
figured
We use MediaWiki, it works for us just fine
dmharrison
Yep mediawiki is great, exports xml. We integrated this into madcap flare and our build. Published (goes to customers) chm, pdf and webhelp takes the latest snapshot and merges it in, internal users can grab the latest by browsing the wiki.

We have a backing internal discussion board for people to discuss training/presales/help and the like which is good for identifying gaps in the doco as well.

simonw
Twiki has the worst wiki markup of any wiki I've ever used. Avoid.

The company I'm working with at the moment is using Confluence, which is reasonable. I'd much rather be using MediaWiki or Trac though.

aleclair
We use Twiki here at CoreStreet as well.
engtech
Yeah, avoid TWiki like the plague. Horrible tool.

What's most important in an enterprise wiki is the search feature, so be prepared to use a 3rd party tool for search.

boredguy8
Confluence

:(

fendale
Nothing sucks more that Confluence - I feel your pain all too well :(
delano
Why the frown? I've had success with Confluence at 4 or 5 companies. My biggest complaint is the handling of major revisions to a hierarchy of documents but that's something that's probably specific to me.

Confluence is a great fit for business and technical people in my experience.

boredguy8
1) J2EE. Which I suppose is a J2EE complaint, but the sins of the father...

2) Searching performs rather poorly in terms of the quality of results.

3) It's licensed.

4) It doesn't scale if you're doing anything more than a text repository.

5) Jira / Confluence integration is, imho, sub-par given that Atlassian makes them both.

Not an "end of the world, woe is me" story, but still ":("-worthy.

((NB: I haven't used any other wiki software, so it's possible that Confluence is far better than any other option...I hope not))

delano
Yeah slowness is definitely ":("-worthy, but in my experience Confluence performs pretty well. It really depends how it's installed and how the database is setup also.

And the search is weak, I agree, but I haven't experienced any significant problems in scaling or Jira integration. It's also much more pleasant to deal with than SharePoint.

For technical-only teams, I highly recommend MoinMoin. It takes some hands on administration (maybe it's better now, I haven't used it for a couple of years) but it was worth it for the flexibility, plug-ins, and the fact that it stored pages in plain text files.

chrismjohnson
My company has utilized MediaWiki, Twiki and Confluence (current) over my year with the company. By far, Confluence is the worst in my opinion. Despite Twiki's setup pains, I still prefer it over MediaWiki (and other wiki's I've personally tried for that matter).
ComputerGuru
I see a lot of people bashing Confluence here.. may I ask why? Having used Twiki, DocuWiki, MediaWiki, and now Confluence; it has become my enterprise wiki of choice. If you can get over its J2EE requirements which make for a huge PITA when the time to upgrade to the next version or make it work with other J2EE applications on the same Tomcat instance, it's a pretty productive tool. It gets the job done, its straight-forward to use, and performs quite good. Can I ask why there are a lot of disenchanted Confluence users out there?
fendale
Our install of Confluence is dog slow and gives a lot of Internal Server Errors - granted that is probably because whoever set it up has done so badly and on inadequate hardware.

Its WYSIWYG editor annoys me quite a bit, and I find its Markup a bit clunky.

I guess my distaste for Confluence comes mostly from the slowness, which is probably not Confluence's fault. Also, editing pages on my Trac install is so much more pleasant.

somabc
Sharepoint!

(No just kidding we use confluence among others)

dizz
One to check out that has been used internally here is DekiWiki ("enterprise-friendly"). We've also began to use it on external collaborative projects. For dev you can't beat Trac right now but Redmine may just superceed Trac. Ones I tend to avoid are TWiki (hugely extensible, but therein lies its weakness) and horrors of all horrors - sharepoint. MediaWiki of "old" is great if you need something up quicky.
hubble
If you need extensibility and power, go with TWiki.
bporterfield
We use Plone CMS (http://www.plone.org) and it's fantastic. Loads of options beyond standard wiki, easy to set up.

Edit: Quote from their site - "An eWeek Labs Analyst's Choice award winner, this open-source product is one of the best solutions period - for company portals and intranets" - eWeek, April 2006 issue

ra
For an enterprise environment, Confluence is the best of the bunch.

1. It has commercial support (you did say: enterprise) 2. It's easy for non-techies to use 3. If you buy the optional "Crowd" product, you can do identity management using AD 4. Use the tomcat bundled version, but upgrade the VM allocated memory to a gig to prevent slowness. 5. Upgrade frequently

rcoder
My small team (two network people, one sysadmin, two devs, one manager) gets a lot of mileage out of DokuWiki for project and systems documentation. It's fast, has good plug-ins, and stores pages in the filesystem, which we consider a plus because it makes backups and versioning a snap.

When we're collaborating with larger groups, though, we tend to pick Redmine by default. It offers a nice combination of ticketing, project management, and documentation features, without the learning curve of a traditional wiki or the deployment headaches of something like Confluence.

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ekzept
yeah, but what do you do if, despite cajoling and management emphasis, none of the damn programmers want to use the damn things? they seem to feel the code is self-sufficient.