Creating an IT Wiki

pu36 · 2011-07-28T11:46:24.000Z

I would like to create a wiki for just the IT staff that will allow us to put problems that we encounter and their solutions. Free is best, but willing to look at other options if they are viable.

Anyone have any recommendations on where to start or wiki software they have experience with?

jay6111 · 2011-07-28T11:49:44.000Z

Do you have sharepoint? It has a wiki feature

-Jay

pu36 · 2011-07-28T11:52:04.000Z

We do. Sharepoint 3.0, but it’s being utilized for something else. We will be eventually moving to 2010, but that’s a ways down the road.

gerardmainardi · 2011-07-28T11:54:08.000Z

We have been using a standard wiki for the last 2 years. It is extremely easy and helpful.

bradnigh · 2011-07-28T11:54:53.000Z

I’ve used media wiki, never really had any problems with it and the documentation is pretty good. It was installed before I started so I don’t know if it was a bear to setup but publishing articles and finding things was easy enough

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

jrjuiliano · 2011-07-28T11:55:07.000Z

Hi,

There is of course MediaWiki ( http://www.mediawiki.org ) which will run on Windows or Linux servers. Great if everyone knows the wiki syntax.

Or you could do something like a Drupal installation ( http://www.drupal.org ) and have “books” created for creating categories and tags and the like. Not quite wiki-ish but workable.

Here are a few more resources to check out and compare:

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

WikiPedia’s Comparisons

Hope that helps. --JR

spiceuser-pqdla · 2011-07-28T12:13:34.000Z

We used Wiki for quite awhile, but moved onto Share-point, and it canu use Wiki, so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

scottalanmiller · 2011-07-28T12:48:39.000Z

SharePoint is great and very multipurpose. But if you want a dedicated wiki, look at DokuWiki (all files, no database) or MediaWiki (database driven.) They are the two big wikis to use that I have seen and both are decently easy with DokuWiki definitely being the simpler of the two.

I’ve used all three and DokuWiki is the lowest overhead and SharePoint is the most powerful.

danielle · 2011-07-28T12:55:47.000Z

We use Sharepoint currently and have used DokuWiki in the past. Both are great resources. Sharepoint is my obvious favorite but DokuWiki is easy to use and does what it needs.

scottalanmiller · 2011-07-28T13:24:15.000Z

Can’t wait until we migrate from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

jackrutter8599 · 2011-07-29T03:17:55.000Z

we use zendesk.com, which is primarily a helpdesk solution (a good one at that), but it also has a ‘forum’ part to it which we use as a wiki. we store all our ‘guides’ in there which you can search by keywords (tags).

helpdesk tickets are also searchable by tags, so when you perform a search of the forum, you get a mix of forum ‘guides’ and helpdesk tickets!

plus side it’s not too expensive either, you pay per helpdesk user, or agent as they call it

admin61786129 · 2011-07-29T03:35:55.000Z

we are using http://www.atlassian.com/ suite for our dev teams but we are using all as a integrated suite, this includes Jira bug tracking / Confluence wiki / bamboo for build we are also using their add on plug-ins.

Very easy to use & very robust, we are using the 10 user license which costs only $10 so spending 50$ we are using entire suite of them, I have installed it, but never restored it, it works on both win & lnx, so you should must evaluate your restore option, as I have never done it, deployment is not an issue, restore is issue, so any thing you select, you must look at restore as one of your primary point of selection.

maxsec · 2011-07-29T04:58:30.000Z

Admin6178 wrote:

we are using http://www.atlassian.com/ suite for our dev teams but we are using all as a integrated suite, this includes Jira bug tracking / Confluence wiki / bamboo for build we are also using their add on plug-ins.

Very easy to use & very robust, we are using the 10 user license which costs only $10 so spending 50$ we are using entire suite of them, I have installed it, but never restored it, it works on both win & lnx, so you should must evaluate your restore option, as I have never done it, deployment is not an issue, restore is issue, so any thing you select, you must look at restore as one of your primary point of selection.

+1

daveproctor · 2011-07-29T05:22:21.000Z

We are trying to startup a similar thing to hold our customer Documentation in. So far I have been using MOWES Portable to run a mediawiki site quite successfully. Easy to backup too as you save the whole folder and thats you backed up

Dave

pcrequest · 2011-07-29T05:40:19.000Z

MCDI wrote:

I would like to create a wiki for just the IT staff that will allow us to put problems that we encounter and their solutions.

Been using Dokuwiki for years and Flyspray for tickets (problem, resolution). These are great if you have some Linux experience. I may replace both with SharePoint at some point (great if you’re Microsoft-centric). Worth pointing out, Spiceworks has a trouble ticket system built in, but I haven’t used it. For other documentation, there are places to write your own notes on assets in Spiceworks.

greggcranshaw9601 · 2011-07-29T06:29:48.000Z

My vote for MediaWiki. I have set it up for two different companies now and it has worked great for both. Easy for IT department to update documentation on the fly. You can add a print to PDF add-on to easily print out documentation. You can also integrate with OpenLDAP or Active Directory for authentication and use group membership to provide read-only or write access to it. Great documentation tool!

gfountain2 · 2011-07-29T06:37:22.000Z

We are also currently using MS SharePoint. Even if it’s in use for other resources, you can set granular permissions so only your IT staff has access to a certain site.

We are also in the process of migrating to Google Apps. While not yet as robust as a Sharepoint solution, their entire Sites platform is built from the idea of a wiki. I have migrated IT’s site in SharePoint to a Google Apps Site. There are trade offs, but the biggest benefit is the search functionality within the Site.

pu36 · 2011-07-29T06:39:14.000Z

So many to choose from which is the same it I came here to resolve. At first I was looking at SharePoint 3.0 on another server or perhaps adding an Application to our existing SharePoint server.

I’ve also considered installing 2008 R2 (which we have a license for) and running with SharePoint Foundation 2010. Anyone had any experience with this?

I decide fly need something that integrates with AD so login in seamless for all staff. Having to keep a separate DB for username and passwords seems a bit much just for some IT docs and troubleshooting tips and tricks.

enots · 2011-07-29T10:01:34.000Z

I have used PMWiki for this specific reason the last two places I worked. Flat file, fast and very configurable.

http://pmwiki.org

aaronmccormack5426 · 2011-07-29T10:14:24.000Z

We use DokuWiki, it’s pretty good for documenting IT solutions. We use this appliance and had it going in a matter of minutes.