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We use Google site's wiki to host a large portion of our internal documents. We use it to track releases, ideas, brainstorms, lists, rack/asset info, etc...

We've realized this is not ideal and we've started hitting capacity/bandwidth limits and we're not really ready to get a full Google apps enterprise setup. We're also very disappointed in Google for not having an export feature for site's wiki, but that's another issue...

I am mainly concerned with finding a replacement with a similar ease of use and the ability to run off of CentOS.

I've seen other articles on Serverfault mention Confluence and Mind Touch. Does anyone have any experience with these or suggest others?

Thanks.

Nathan Milford
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9 Answers9

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Number 1 rule when thinking about using a wiki in a company. If it's not easy to use it won't be used.

I have a hard time recommending MediaWiki for company use due to the above rule and it lacks access controls. There are a number of plugins that attempt to lock down MediaWiki but without this being done in the core code I'm not sure how well these work. But you should read the warning at the top of this page.

I've used MoinMoin at a couple of companies and have had good luck with it. It features a WYSIWYG editor and allows you to paste from Word in addition to the standard markup language. But any wiki that is focused on the end user experience and has proper access controls should work.

3dinfluence
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I heard lots of good of http://twiki.org/ as an enterprise Wiki. there may be no reason for it to not work with your setup.

Maxwell
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I like MoinMoinWiki - it's written in Python and very suitable for a Linux installation.

MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) would be another good choice - I guess this one should qualify for the "enterprise" label :-)

Jørn Schou-Rode
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We use Confluence where I work, and it's not too shabby as far as wikis go. Mediawiki is also good if you want to go the free route (and very solid as mentioned in another answer). You'll certainly have an easier time setting up MediaWiki as there's no real need to muck about with Java to get Confluence up and running.

If you want to see a running public confluence install, you can always check out the opscode one: http://wiki.opscode.com/dashboard.action (and http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home).

My 2 cents

Ian Selby
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Mediawiki, it is kind of how everyone expect how a wiki should behave. Just make sure that you need a username to change stuff.

And you don't need much access control, it just makes the user experience annoying. All you need to do is to remove the anonymous feeling (and a username does that).

And don't be nervous about Mediawiki lacking a wysiwyg user interface, most people with half a brain cell can to the basic stuff there after a hour or two... (or google and find out how is is suppose to work)

Johan
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I've used reviki and ikiwiki, both of which are geared towards storing the wiki content in a revision control system such as Subversion, rather than rolling their own ad-hoc version control. reviki in particular seems easy to use, but it's a little more tricky to install than ikiwiki since you need TomCat or similar rather than just plain CGI support.

David North
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I'm not sure what your actual requirements are (having never used the Google wiki stuff) but I've run mediawiki off CentOS a number of times and found it to be rock solid. I believe it is even in the EPEL repository, although most of my installs have been tarball downloads.

Ophidian
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We use Mindtouch, and it has been incredible for us.

From an system administrator point of view, it is simple to set up (either from source so you can use your CentOS, or the pre-packed VM built on Debian). It is highly configurable (we have ours using Single Sign On with Active Directory, secured behind a reverse proxy for external access with SSL at login time only), and very expandable.

Pretty much everything you described it would be used for, it does well. Ours is used for both a company Intranet, to display current events, resources for employees and other tools, as well as hold the knowledge-base for IT and our other documentation. We have also begun using it to hold html forms that either post to email, or to a different mysql database, where a page outputs results.

For users, use is very easy. There is an excellent WYSIWYG editor (FCKEditor), and the skins are aesthetically pleasing and logically laid out.

To get an idea of what its like, download the VM and try it out. Otherwise, visit http://developer.mindtouch.com/. That site runs on Mindtouch, and contains many examples of the possibilities.

Jeff Miles
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What do you mean exactly by 'enterprise' wiki?

I'm a big fan of DokuWiki I've ran it on two different projects now and it's simple enough (all files, no DB) to quickly jump in, but powerful enough you dont end up have to redo it later. There's plenty of plugins for non-out-of-box functionality. The only annoyance about it to me is how you store/retrieve documents. Once you figure out how to deal with it, it's no bother.

Marcin
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