Finally, a good wiki summary

For a week or two now, I have been trying to explore and understand "enterprise-wikis". It is quite easy to find high-level philisophical discussions about the importance of wiki adoption at the enterprise level, but it is HARD to find honest reviews about various wikis.

The reason this is frustrating is because I am trying to choose an enterprise wiki for deployment at my place of work. Heck, it's even challenging to find a list of different wikis and what they are good for.

Finally, I found a good article here. It is written from a non-geek perspective, and he gives an accurate summary of the key criteria is a good enterprise wiki:

• is beautiful
• is easy to use
• integrates with our corporate authentication system
• allows users to "email to a page"
• has rock solid WYSIWYG editing (including tables!!)
• can absorb Microsoft Word's messy HTML without barfing
• has great management tools for pruning and gardening the wiki
• allows for attachments of files
• includes great threaded conversations on a page
• is hosted but can also be used in an appliance inside the firewall
• has granular user & group security privileges (ideally tied into Active Directory)

My list of criteria is pretty much exactly the same, and I thought that this criteria was pretty obvious and self explanatory. Lo and behold, when I started exploring different wikis (socialtext, confluence, PBWiki, stikipad, zoho), and found that that all fell short on many of these criteria. The biggest offence was usually against the "rock solid WYSIWYG" (not all WYSIWYG editors are created equal) and "great management tools for pruning and gardeing the wiki".

He argues that confluence is the best, and based on what I have observed I would tend to agree. However, even confluence still fails in the two key criteria I listed in the table above. Yes, it's got WYSIWYG, but it's table layout functionality is very inflexible, and until you've figured things out it's not intuitive where you are saving pages.