I was talking with a PM at another company the other day who was insistent that their tech wiki pages reside in Sharepoint.\u00a0 I have been to places like that before and it sucks and this is why, in a nutshell:<\/p>\n
Sharepoint wiki functionality sucks.\u00a0\u00a0 Usability SUCKS.\u00a0\u00a0 Its not fluid, it doesn’t support full wiki syntax, its HTML syntax is limited,\u00a0 and it hates images.\u00a0 And the biggest problem is usually Sharepoint is locked down on a site with security, which defeats the purpose of a wiki altogether which is trust and public knowledge maintained by everyone.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Use the Tool for the job, dammit.<\/p>\n Of course the story I got from her was how they couldn’t get enough content in there.\u00a0\u00a0 The teams avoided it like the plague.\u00a0 So I told her my reasons why Sharepoint isn’t any good as a wiki.\u00a0\u00a0 Its stupendous as a document repository; but many times sites distrust the developers and force them to use an inefficient tool, and then get upset because the tool won’t perform.\u00a0 It’s very simple:\u00a0 who is using the tool?\u00a0 Who is the audience?\u00a0 Then why in god’s name does a non-interested party get to pick the tool for these people?<\/p>\n Good Tools<\/strong><\/p>\n There are so many good wiki engines out there I don’t even know where to start.\u00a0\u00a0 Many are PHP based and will simply run on an Apache server.\u00a0 MediaWiki or PmWiki,\u00a0\u00a0 I like the latter because it is lightweight, and even use it for the Ivy Street Project site.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes, you might have a J2EE shop and your in house server is JBoss or Tomcat (neither of which need Apache) so, you want a J2EE solution.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve seen countless JSPWiki installations.\u00a0 Or, you can buy awesome wiki engines like Atlassian Confluence.<\/p>\n The point is: use the tool to fit the job.\u00a0 Sharepoint is not a good wiki, its only a good document repository.\u00a0 Good for versioning etc. all those BA docs and SLA’s and etc.<\/p>\n Formula<\/strong><\/p>\n A workable wiki engine will have a very easy to use interface, support wiki syntax and perhaps HTML.\u00a0 Images aren’t a pain.\u00a0 It works on a lot of databases or none at all (PmWiki — flat files).\u00a0\u00a0 The search engine works nice and the taxonomy should be easily adjustable.<\/p>\n What’s a wiki for?\u00a0 Well its NOT to store legacy information.\u00a0 It should contain the most up to date information about developer setup, environments, methodologies.\u00a0 Design.\u00a0 Today’s stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 Everyone contributes and keeps it rolling;\u00a0 that’s what it’s for.<\/p>\n My friend listened to me and I am hopeful she sees what this is really all about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was talking with a PM at another company the other day who was insistent that their tech wiki pages reside in Sharepoint.\u00a0 I have been to places like that before and it sucks and this is why, in a nutshell: Sharepoint wiki functionality sucks.\u00a0\u00a0 Usability SUCKS.\u00a0\u00a0 Its not fluid, it doesn’t support full wiki […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":254,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}