Enterprise Wikis

One of the professors in my department sought my help to install a wiki in his department-provided web space. Alas, our PHP implementation is too old, so I asked him to hold off his wiki intentions until we could upgrade the server. A faculty member also expressed an interest in a wiki.

It's only a matter of time before other folks within the department will want to use a wiki, too. I do not want to have lots of independent wiki installations living on our server, each with their own account database and permission schemes. Ideally, I'd like to have a single wiki installation that we in I.T. can maintain, and which can be partitioned off for use by multiple users. It must be able to authenticate either against our ActiveDirectory server or against the OSU IMAP server so that I can avoid altogether issues of password maintenance. It must support some mechanism of privilege delegation, so that I can say "This user can administer these pages, but no others". And it must provide some means of tracking who does what. It'd be great if it could be Kerberized, so that domain users don't need to bother logging in just to this tool.

I recalled SocialText from somewhere, so I took some time to investigate. It's certainly an interesting looking package, and almost does most of what I want. I sat through an online product demonstration with a very friendly sales rep. Alas, the sales rep spent too much time trying to get me excited about basic wiki features, even after I told her that I am extremely well versed in content management, rich text editing, and other wiki concepts.

SocialText's core offering is a hosted solution. The pricing strikes me as a little exorbitant, but so be it. I'm not interested in a hosted solution: I want something I can install on my servers and maintain myself. Alas, SocialText does not offer such a thing. Instead, they offer a wiki appliance, which comes pre-configured to provide a drop-in solution. Pricing starts at $400/month.

I might need to have another product demonstration, in order to truly appreciate all of the "enterprise" functionality that SocialText provides. The sales rep jumped pretty quickly into ways she thought we might use a wiki, and as a result she was fairly wide of the mark. I don't think any of our faculty would use a department wiki for course content when the University provides Carmen, the OSU-branded course management solution powered by Desire2Learn. A departmental wiki would mostly -- I think -- be used for internal coordination and collaboration outside of the context of any specific class or course. Profs and grad students might work together on research documentation, for example.

Given the fairly light use, at least initially, I don't think SocialText provides us enough to justify the price. I did take a look at SocialText Open, the open source flavor of their enterprise solution. This is truly terrifying: it has 150+ CPAN dependencies, requires Apache 1.3 with specific configurations, and I was told by the SocialText sales rep that it's nearly impossible to install without paid support. I guess, strictly speaking, it is open source since I can access the source code; open source says nothing about the source code actually being usable.

I asked for recommendations from COLUG. Pat suggested that I give Drupal a look: in particular the Organic Groups module. I did look, and I am impressed.

I'd been leaning toward using Drupal to drive the revamped website for the department. My only concern is that it's got a fairly steep learning curve, even for most basic operations. I'm worried that I won't be able to convince the faculty to use it, and they'd all resort to running their own wikis.

So, do any readers have any suggestions or feedback? Are there other packages I ought to look at? Is Drupal + Organic Groups up to the task?

12 Comments

On Nov 21st, 2006 at 06:30am Joseph Scott added:

I've played with DokuWiki a bit and I think it might meet your authentication and permission requirements. I haven't spent enough time with it yet to try it out against our ActiveDirectory setup, but it supposedly supports it. The permission feature is there and works, but felt a little awkward to use.

Please post follow ups on this, I'd like to hear about why you try out and what you eventually pick and why.

On Nov 21st, 2006 at 02:22pm skippy added:

Joseph: can you elaborate a bit on why you think DokuWiki is a good choice? A few COLUG folks recommended it also, and I did take a peek at it. It's not immediately clear to me what makes it worth deeper investigation.

I'm marginally concerned about the "no database" feature: sure, it makes for super portable data storage, but I really dislike making directories writable by my web server.

DokuWiki's ACL implementation looks to be a bit lacking for my expected needs, too. ACLs can only be assigned by the superuser, if I read the documentation correctly. There does not seem to be a provision to grant limited administration rights to users or groups on a per-page or per-namespace basis (such that I could say "Professor Foo can manage the ACLs on these pages, so that he can create ad-hoc groups with his grad students").

On Nov 21st, 2006 at 05:00pm Joseph Scott added:

I mentioned DokuWiki because most other wiki packages seem to shun ACLs and outside authentication.

Overall though my feeling is that there is still a void in the area of an "Enterprise" (I really, really, really don't like that word) wiki. My experience has been that this is because many who push for the use of wikis the most feel that those features (good ACLs, outside auth, name spaces, etc) go against the very essence of what a wiki is supposed to be. I don't agree with that idea.

For that matter, I also don't care for many of the syntax implementations in wikis, but that's another topic :-)

Perhaps it is time for another open source project to fill this void.

On Nov 21st, 2006 at 07:49pm Andy Lester added:

Hi, I'm responsible for the Socialtext Open release.

We're well aware that the process is not as simple as we'd like, but it's something we're continually working on. "Impossible to install" is certainly not the case.

To your specific concerns:

* Yes, we require Apache 1.3. Upgrading to Apache 2 is coming, but as you may imagine, it will take some undoing of API usage.

* There are 150 CPAN dependencies, but their installation is automated, except for a few modules that ask questions.

* If you're running Debian or Ubuntu, you can use Socialtext's package repository to install those modules. This speeds things up immensely.

I would be glad to help with your installation process however I can. Drop me an email, or AIM me at "petdance". I'm online pretty much all day.

Thanks,
Andy

On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 02:34pm skippy added:

Andy: thanks for the comment. The INSTALL file is a little daunting, and the dependency chain plus configuration requirements makes SocialText Open more than a little challenging to test without a dedicated system for that test. I suppose, ultimately, that it's unreasonable of me to seek an enterprise solution that is also easy to install for testing purposes... ;)

This may well be the excuse I've been looking for to fiddle with Xen and/or VMware, though: I can prep a virtual machine to dedicate to SocialText Open.

On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 06:27pm wila added:

How about Atlassian's Confluence product? It's installed behind the firewall, has heaps of enterprise level features, integrates well with LDAP, and there are a bunch of academic organisations already using Confluence.

For partitioning purposes, Spaces could be used. Delegation of permissions can be done on a Space by Space level, which could be helpful as well.

Just a few thoughts. Best of luck!

On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 06:42pm John Kerns, Jr. added:

You might try out MediaWiki. Novell, as far as I know, use it exclusively for all of their official wikis.

On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 07:27pm Aeonscope added:

I'm a bit shocked, being a WP plugin developer yourself, that you haven't considered using WordPress MU?. :)

On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 08:06pm skippy added:

Confluence, and eTouch SamePage (recommended to me in a private email), both use J2EE. I suppose I should have qualified my comments a bit more by stating that I'd like something I can personally manage and support. I have zero experience with J2EE, Apache Tomcat, and other Java server solutions, and I would greatly prefer to avoid learning an entirely new server infrastructure in order to deploy wikis for my users.

I genuinely appreciate the comments, and I am looking at each of the products suggested so far. I'm not so closed minded as to completely rule out something that might require me to stretch a bit beyond my comfort level.

But before I do go beyond my comfort level, let me try to clarify my desired feature list a bit:
* I prefer Free Software solutions over proprietary solutions. I'd like to be able to take my entire working configuration and give it to another department or college in the University so that they can benefit from my expeirence and expertise. (Freedom 2)
* I'd prefer a PHP solution, since PHP is the language I know best at the moment. I would like to know that I can make code changes if necessary (Freedom 1). Java, Python, and most perl is beyond me at the moment.
* I'd prefer something that is designed with some granular permission model from the beginning. I want to be able to grant permissions on some pages to some users, so that they can further grant permissions to other users on those pages as they see fit. I do not want to act as an ACL concierge, constantly responding to requests for access.
* I'd like to be able to easily connect the authentication mechanism to either the OSU IMAP server or our department's ActiveDirectory server. Kerberized logins would be nice, but not necessary. From what I've seen, neither MediaWiki nor DokuWiki really satisfy this goal.
I'm sure there are other assumptions I have about what I'd like that I won't realize until someone says "Product X does all of that, but has this other requirement/limitation".

John Kerns: I've used MediaWiki in the past for a couple of projects, and it's not at all a bad wiki; but I don't think it offers me the granularity I seek. I could create Namespaces for various projects / groups, probably, but that seems like the wrong way to solve the issue I'm facing. MediaWiki was also rather difficult for me to style, when last I looked, and I would like to have these wikis fit within the department's visual branding as best I can.

Aeonscope: it is my understanding that WPMU requires wildcard domain names to work properly, since each user is assigned a sub-domain of the master site. I do not control the DNS for my department, and I do not want to be saddled with managing DNS requests every time a user comes or goes. Besides, if I'm unsatisfied with WordPress development, what's different enough about WordPress MU to make me believe it'll be any different?

WPMU is also just blogs: I don't want just blogs. I want wikis and blogs (and possibly forums, mailing lists, photo galleries, and any number of other collaboration services). It is for this reason that I am leaning toward Drupal.

Ultimately, though, I'll likely need to install many of these recommendations and see how well they each work, and whether I think I can make them work for me.

Do please keep the suggestions coming: I appreciate them, and I am evaluating them.

On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 10:49pm pat added:

I would be glad to get you up to speed on Drupal, although my wife says I'm not the best teacher (her way of saying I suck). It really is not hard once you learn the hooks.

On Nov 23rd, 2006 at 01:23am Aeonscope added:

I understand your situation. Yeah, I knew about your getting burned with your WP-DB-Backup plugin. I don't like seeing news like that either. However, I just want to point out that you can choose, during the installation of WordPress MU, to use domain names OR sub-directories for all your blogs.

On Nov 23rd, 2006 at 06:46am Danq added:

Not that it's any of my business but I was passing by... Have you considered a Joomla CMS? It's fairly robust on your end, and there are a few hundred components, maybe 1,000, (plug-ins)already available, but it's fairly routine for the user with big icons in the back room, and with the right module, the ability to post news and documents from the desktop without having to access even the browser.