wiki on windows

[Alan Dayley]

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Josh Coffman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>     We're all pretty convinced to use a wiki for development guidelines and internal information. I'd like some suggestions for wikiis that are easy to use/install on Windows. 
> 
> Thanks
> Josh

Very cool!  I really like wikis.  We use one very heavily where I work.

I don't understand where you said "easy to use/install on Windows."
Does that mean the wiki server is running on Windows or that the clients
are on Windows or both?

I am sure there are many wiki server solutions that run on Windows.  I
have not had to try to use a Windows OS as the platform so I don't know
how well that works.

As for the clients, the browser has more effect on how the wiki
performs, regardless of the underlying OS.  Most wikis work fine in any
browser though there are some differences.

Where I work we use TWiki (http://twiki.org) running on a Linux server.
 It uses version controlled text files for the data storage and so only
requires a web server with Perl CGI capability.  Almost everyone uses
Windows of one flavor or another most of the time on the client.
Browsers in use are IE, Firefox, other Mozilla-based and at least one
Opera user.  No significant problems are reported aside from slight
layout differences.

We chose TWiki because every topic and every attachment is version
controlled at the server.  You can go back to any previous version of a
page, do diffs and see who changed it.  Other documents can then site
specific versions of a page a canonical which is required for ISO 9000
compliance.

TWiki's biggest weakness is the WYSIWYG editor.  The latest version has
a decent one as "beta" but the non-programmer users balk at using it.
Learning how to edit wiki pages with the markup language or even the
WYSIWYG editor continues to be the biggest barrier to use.

The other issue has been difficulty of searching.  Because the wiki grew
from two initial users to dozens, it's structure has evolved (like you'd
expect) instead of being designed.  The result is that someone new to
using it cannot immediately understand the logic of navigation in the
topics.  We may be in for a significant refactoring at some point.  You
may want to define some structure suitable to your purposes before you
get too much content into it.

We in Engineering use it for change proposals, design documents, bug
reports, investigation and testing records, release documents, projects
logs, etc.  Other people got tired of us telling them "It's in the
wiki." so much that, in some cases, they have finally come to accept it.
 We had made and then wore T-shirts one Friday for fun
(http://www.zazzle.com/product/235484775209974130 (Not a plug to sell
them, it's just fun.)).


I'm rambling now and should get back to work.  You can tell I'm a fan of
wikis.

Alan

PS For a personal wiki that fits in one HTML file, try
http://tiddlywiki.com/  Someone on the plug-webdev list suggested it a
while back.  Great tool!
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