Understanding the Wiki Market

Corporate customers looking to implement a wiki for a mainstream business application may face a bewildering array of choices. In order to help make the landscape more understandable I’ve created a brief overview of some of the different wiki options.

Open Source

The wiki concept started with an open source model and there is still intense activity in this space. Wikis were originally created by developers for use by other developers and that is still probably the most common use for them today. But as a result these wikis are often very technically oriented. Many of these open source wikis work best in the hands of someone who is comfortable with complex scripting and naming conventions.

There are many examples that fit into this category. A few of them are listed below:

• MediaWiki
• PmWiki
• Twiki

Consumer Wikis

A new breed of hosted wikis is emerging. These wikis are designed to be created quickly and accessed over the internet. These are good for small groups whether they are ad hoc public groups or a small team within a larger organization. They usually tend to include a community element.

Examples include:

• EditMe
• Seedwiki
• Wikispaces
• Jot

Enterprise Wikis

Enterprise wikis are designed to be deployed by an entire corporation or a department in a large organization. As a result they need to take into account security, access control, and segmentation through more granular control of where and when wiki collaboration can take place. They also need to be backed by an organization that is designed to support a large corporate implementation. Getting a small team engaged with a workgroup wiki is a very different proposition from getting a 50 person sales support team and a 6,000 person field sales force sharing information in a corporate environment.

Examples include:

• Atlassian Confluence
• CustomerVision
• Socialtext

Comments

[Mike Cannon-Brookes]

A good summary overall Brian.

I don't want to be one of those "me too" commenters, but I think you overlooked Confluence in your list of enterprise wikis.

http://www.atlassian.com/confluence

With over 700 enterprise customers across the world - we _are_ the leading enterprise wiki.

Cheers,
Mike

[Brian Keairns]

Mike,

Good point. I've updated my list.

-Brian