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Managing Sharing of a Knowledge Database
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 3, 2013 at 11:13 PM
Garland Coulson wrote:
>This is a big decision for me as this is
>intended to hold a huge database of knowledge over time and it would be
>frustrating to build the knowledge base for a couple of years and then
>find I needed to change.
I don’t think that you can go wrong with WordPress. In the past years it has grown from a capable blogging platform to a fully fledged CMS with infinite extendability, plugins for everything one can imagine, and a huge support community, while remaining extremely user and developer friendly, even for people like myself who don’t want to go into coding if they can help it.
By contrast, there are so many wikis around and with so many variations of markup and operations, that I find the wiki concept has become a victim of its own success. Check this http://wikimatrix.org for a very good overview of features. Dokuwiki is an excellent option and has the advantage that it can use plain text files for storage, but it remains the work of a single developer, unless I am mistaken. If longevity is the deciding factor, MediaWiki might be a better option (and it also has a WYSIWYG plugin) but it is overall a more difficult animal to tame.
That said, for sharing existing knowledge which are often interlinked in very complex ways, the infinite flexibility of wiki unstructured organisation of material is hard to beat.
Nevertheless, I would suggest that you take a look at Plone http://plone.org Without going into details, I believe that it may be a strong contender. Again, you may check its features compared to other CMSystems here http://cmsmatrix.org
Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 4, 2013 at 03:49 PM
A very simple and pleasant solution is samepage.io, which offers a 10GB extranet for unlimited users for free. It’s a great place to store documents, but also for collaboration. It’s based on the (alas, now deprecated) Kerio Workspace, but is actually considerably more powerful. I’d suggest creating a free account and experimenting with it.
The company that runs it is Kerio, who have been around for a long time and produce various highly regarded software products (e.g. Kerio Connect).
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 4, 2013 at 04:46 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>A very simple and pleasant solution is samepage.io, which offers a 10GB
>extranet for unlimited users for free. It’s a great place to store
>documents, but also for collaboration. It’s based on the (alas, now
>deprecated) Kerio Workspace, but is actually considerably more powerful.
Kerio Workspace was quite a unique tool: very easy to setup and use, as convenient as many cloud tools, but easily hosted internally at a small business environment.
Have they changed their business model for this product to service-driven? And how can one be certain that such a service will continue, when the product that preceded it was made redundant?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 4, 2013 at 09:00 PM
Correct - they disappointed many Kerio Workspace beta testers (myself included) by suddenly announcing SamePage while at the same time withdrawing the Workspace product. They did explain the strategy behind this (SamePage is built on technology that is substantially more scalable; Workspace is something of a dead end, apparently), but it still left a bad taste in the mouth. Not least because they had no intention of releasing SamePage as a downloadable application; they were determined to run it as a service.
Having said that, we still run Workspace internally, with Kerio’s blessing, and it’s still occasionally updated. SamePage is an ambitious project, and I would be surprised if they dropped it just like that; Kerio is long-term player in the software market. But there are no guarantees in the new ultra-fast-moving software world - just look at the furore engendered by Windows 8, or the current outrage over Apple’s revamped iWork suite. Our own business is run on Soonr, a Dropbox-equivalent service optimized for business. So far, it’s been impeccable. Will it always be so? I’d love to think so, but I’m not expecting any guarantees.
On the other hand, SamePage is easy to use. It’s free, too, for up to 10GB of data (which is, despite all you may hear to the contrary, a lot of data!). It’s easy-peasy to sign up. And it works very well - I’ve been running an informal SamePage account for several months now, and it’s a pleasure to use. It’s also easy to print out pages as PDF files. So if it does eventually go tits-up, does it really matter? The wise man preserves copies of data in any case - I don’t keep anything in the Cloud that isn’t also archived chez moi. Including e-mail (collected every hour by our MailStore server - our e-mail archives have already helped us on a couple of potentially embarrassing occasions). It’s really a question of how you ride the wave!
Posted by Garland Coulson
Nov 7, 2013 at 12:49 AM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>
>I don’t think that you can go wrong with WordPress. In the past years it
>has grown from a capable blogging platform to a fully fledged CMS with
>infinite extendability, plugins for everything one can imagine, and a
>huge support community, while remaining extremely user and developer
>friendly, even for people like myself who don’t want to go into coding
>if they can help it.
>
>By contrast, there are so many wikis around and with so many variations
>of markup and operations, that I find the wiki concept has become a
>victim of its own success.
Thanks Alexander,
I use Wordpress for a bunch of different web sites of my own well as setting up sites for my clients. So I would consider myself a Wordpress power user - I also teach others how to use it.
I agree with you that Wordpress has really come into its own as a CMS. It might make sense to stick with what I know.
I did spend some time playing with Dokuwiki and it worked well. I think it could work but things like nested navigation and membership controls might be easier to manage in Wordpress as I already have solutions there. I will try setting up a stand-alone Wordpress site next and see how it looks.