Saturday, September 28, 2013

The corporate wiki I want

The modern publicly traded corporation is to data as water is to iron. It is a challenging environment for use of anything but the most corrosion-resistant materials: .doc, .ppt and .xls. It's not a good home for things like Wikis.

So we need a corrosion-resistant Wiki. This is what I think we need:

  • Minimal dependencies, maximal configuration simplicity. This probably means file based, no database dependencies.
  • No expertise for setup and operation - if you can use basic Word and files you can implement and move the Wiki in under 1 hour.
  • Rapid and perfect portability. Rapid moves, no broken links.
  • WYSIWYG (roughly) and a native syntax that works. Probably markdown.
  • Strong search API
  • Cross-platform (shudder. Does this mean Java for the environment?)
  • Low cost or open source/free. (Freemium model ok for scale)
  • Maximal link preservation (Confluence, I can't believe how readily you break external links. This is simple stuff.)
There are probably other requirements, but I only have five minutes. Those are a good start.
 
This wiki doesn't exist today, but I am certain it could be built. The next time I'm unemployed it's on my list (along with a lot of other things, alas)

See also

3 comments:

alexjacobson said...

Google docs? Hackpad?

alexjacobson said...
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John Gordon said...

Being corporate, data has to stay local -- no moving to more stable environments.