Five enterprise open source wiki apps to watch

Content and application collaboration features in open source wikis are adding a new dimension to enterprise knowledge management.

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Collaborative editing of Web documents has brought a new dimension to enterprise knowledge management. The architecture that made Wikipedia famous can now be applied to internal processes. And because of their long association with open source projects many of the most popular wikis are themselves open source. Here are five open source enterprise wikis to keep an eye on.

1. MindTouch

MindTouch (formerly deki wiki) is an enterprise wiki and collaborative portal which allows access to Web-service extensions, PHP plug-ins, user and group permissions, and SSL encryption. Support and many of the advanced features are only available in the commercial versions.

URL: www.mindtouch.com
Licence: GPL

2. Mediawiki

MediaWiki is the wiki application made famous for running Wikipedia. It's designed to be run on a large server farm for a Web site that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki supports versioning of pages and can manage image and multimedia files. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software. MediWiki supports skins and plug-ins for extensibility. The application is developed in PHP and supports MySQL and PostgreSQL.

URL: www.mediawiki.org
Licence: GPL

3. TWiki

TWiki is a wiki application that calls itself “the open source enterprise wiki and Web 2.0 application platform”. According to the project, users without programming skills can create Web applications using TWiki to manage both structured and unstructured information. There is an extensive list of applications and plug-ins available for TWiki, which itself is developed in Perl.

URL: www.twiki.org
Licence: GPL

4. XWiki

If your application platform is Java then XWiki is worth a look. Like TWiki, XWiki considers itself a “second-generation” wiki which can be used to create collaborative Web applications in addition to content. Other features include an office importer to turn office documents (Microsoft, OpenOffice.org, PDF) into wiki pages, as well as a document lifecycle manager. XWiki has a set of bundled applications that can also be used to extend its functionality.

URL: www.xwiki.org
Licence: LGPL

5. ScrewTurn Wiki

If your application platform is .Net you can try ScrewTurn Wiki, an ASP.NET wiki engine. ScrewTurn Wiki does not require a database nor any modifications to IIS to run. Its developers claim high performance and scalability thanks to a “smart” content caching system and small footprint. Other features include automatic page backups, page-level authorisation and plug-in support.

URL: www.screwturn.eu
Licence: GPL