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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: Deciding on a wiki for my company
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I recently started putting knowledge into a wiki that i got for free from my subversion hoster csvdude.com. Having a “team” account at this site gives me free trac installations. Trac is quite useful because its a little wiki, a little bugtracking system and a little tool for browsing through subversion repositories via web. But here are the reason why i dont like Trac that much:
1) i have a bugtracking system and apart from some minor headaches with PHP and Pear, i like Fogbugz
2) the wiki implementation and features are quite limited, at least when it comes to permissions
Because i think that sharing knowledge by writing it down is the best way to run a good software business, i want to make the wiki a first class citizen in my IT landscape. As always, my main focus is on java based software and after googling and checking some communities, two wikis are left in the selection process: Confluence and XWiki. Other, potentially great, wikis like twiki did not make it because of my java filter.
Today i installed Confluence with a 30 day trial and made my first steps. My first impression is: Very nice. From a technical standpoint it has everything i am searching for and its quite intuitive. Unfortunately its entry level version (”team”) comes at 1200$, which is not that cheap for a small company. And with small i mean much smaller than the 25 users that comes with the team license. On the other hand, the dollar is quite cheap nowadays and an investement about 900 EUROs is manageable of course. Its the same with Jira, which i really like but there its the same problem. Fogbugz has a per-user licensing which is of course better for small companies.
XWiki is the other one which i just downloaded and where i begin testing today. I am quite sure that its not that stable, feature rich and beautiful as Confluence but for its price tag of 0$, i could live with _minor_ issues. But now, after playing with confluence for an hour or something, its much harder to tolerate weaknesses. So lets see how XWiki performs.
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