For an exciting internal project on my new company, I’m working on a little research on enterprise wikis.

There are of course some comprehensive and updated articles to select the right tool. For example the wikimatrix.

Being an advocate of usability, user centred methodologies and user experience I’m very disappointed to learn that quite all current wiki implementations don’t provide a number of really fundamental features in an enterprise scenario (at least for me).

A quick list could be:

• strong usability and a real WYSIWYG editor
• open source license
• a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php) architecture if possible
• data stored in a well known database
• ACL and fine grained permissions
• a behind-the-firewall solution
• a powerful search engine for the entire content

Well, some of these features aren’t mandatory and can vary depending on your expectations and needs. Some of them are anyway a must inside an enterprise.

Here usability is the single most important feature. Employees often perceive writing a wiki an additional time-consuming task added to their everyday activities. To get a reasonable participation we have to keep things very very simply.

On the same length, corporate users need a real WYSIWYG editor, not an editor producing fancy characters typical of a wiki sintax. This request excludes the majority of non commercial wiki systems (targeted more to developers and geeks than to average users)

In my opinion, the only options worth of being evaluated as effective Enterprise Wikis are :

• SocialText (the new release will be released the next week)
• JotSpot
• Confluence
• Dekiwiki
• Twiki with Kupu editor

All of them but Dekiwiki and Twiki are commercial solutions.

Getting quickly to the point, JotSpot is the winner for me and for a long list of reasons: great usability, good wysiwyg editor, intuitive permissions and group management, a rich set of additional applications that can be used to create a complete intranet solution and, finally, a reasonable monthly cost. Yes, JotSpot is an hosted solution (actually it is only provided as a service because the server package is no longer sold by the company) so the big drawback is that your reserved and critical information will be accessible only when you are online and with the risk of being seen by competitors. JotSpot says that they are using SSL connections and of course you can use groups and permissions, but on my personal account SSL is not present and it could be anyway not enough for large enteprises.

SocialText (Perl) and Confluence (J2EE) are good professional (and quite costly) solutions that can be used remotely as services or installed on your servers (or on appliances). SocialText has also an open source version (not very updated though). I will wait to see the new release of SocialText, promising impressive improvements on this side (Ross Mayfield published an informative SocialText 2 screencast). My impression is anyway that the simplicity and power of JotSpot is still very far.

Finally, I discovered DekiWiki from MindTouch. It’s a free and quite complete software born as a fork of MediaWiki (the software powering Wikipedia). Indexing is done with Lucene and AJAX is employed when needed.

Further Reading:

• The difference between an enterprise wiki and a content management system
• A comparison of major enterprise wikis

Anyone of you having other suggestions?

Update October, 31th:

From Ross in the comments: Socialtext 2.0 has been released to our hosted wiki service. The open source release, Socialtext Open 2.0, will be released to SourceForge later this week:

• Socialtext Open 2.0 is coming soon

This is wonderful! I didn’t expected to have the open version updated to the release 2.0 in such a short time. More on Social Text 2.0 later.

From Andrea Resmini: I was wrong. Twiki has a WYSIWYG plugin. Its name is Kupu. So DekiWiki is not the only non commercial solution available and satisfying my criteria.

Google has acquired Jotspot: paying account will become completely free after the end of the current billing cycle. Google is quickly moving towards a complete online office suite, buying the best products currently on the market and adding to them their incredible vision and infrastructure. Is this the reason for suspending the server version?

Have a look at TechCrunch’s , Ross Mayfield’s and Google’s posts

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.