Apple Wiki

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Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 12, 2016 at 11:58 AM

We haven’t talked much about wikis recently, so I thought I’d bring people up to date with our experience of the Apple Wiki included with the very modestly priced Apple Server package.

So dreadful are the reviews of the latter that I only installed Apple Server on a Mac Mini that is actually running a number of other apps with considerable trepidation. But Apple Wiki has interested me for a long time, and I wanted to see whether it was any good.

And in fact, the whole experience has been very pleasant. Please note that the only Apple Server function I’m actually using is the Wiki server; I’m not using any of the more complex options available. But the wiki is, as it happens, very good, and becomes the default web page for the machine as a whole if you haven’t already started to use the Apple Server web function.

You can create multiple wikis. You can serve as many users as you like. You can search wikis at speed. You can filter search results, or constrain them further. The formatting functions are comprehensive enough for us (and include support for tables). There’s a commenting function. There’s support for tagging. Entries are automatically updated with the latest date modified/author info. There is even a page overview (although not an actual navigation tree, but then this is a wiki). The admin functions are easy to understand and use.

The only thing I miss? Search hits aren’t highlighted in the actual pages (although they are in the Google-a-like summary that appears in the list of search results). But that’s a minor issue, really; only a couple of major wiki platforms highlight search hits in pages (DokuWiki and Plone); the rest - including the once impressive Confluence - appear to have decided that this isn’t a necessary function. We do run a DokuWiki wiki on our Synology NAS, as it happens, but Apple Wiki is much more pleasant to use.

In short, Apple Wiki is really rather good, and we’ve started storing more and more in-house data on it as we’ve gained confidence in its abilities. All for the very modest price of around GBP 25, direct from the Apple Store.

Posted by Simon
Nov 6, 2017 at 10:44 AM

how are you finding this over a year on?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 7, 2017 at 02:36 PM

Ah, well, I have to confess that it never really took off to the extent I hoped it would.

Colleagues continue to prefer our (now very outdated) Kerio Workspace setup, based on the excellent original (but discontinued) software by Kerio. As you know, overcoming corporate inertia is very tricky, and Kerio Workspace does work very well, so they can’t see any pronounced advantages in changing over.

I am, of course, looking for replacements for Kerio Workspace, not least for reasons of security, but it has to be something relatively friendly. Currently, my preference is for DokuWiki, which has the advantage of being very easy to manage (but not quite as user-friendly), with an outstanding search function (one of our key criteria); much better than Apple Wiki’s, in fact. But I’d love to find something friendlier (that didn’t automatically involve putting the entire wellbeing of my company in the hands of some unknown Cloud services provider).

I’ve toyed with using one of the many rather capable WordPress templates now available for collaboration, but haven’t had time to do a really thorough investigation. I know an increasing number of companies do use WordPress for intranets and extranets, and that there are templates around that support real-time collaboration. But I need to catch up with it all again - it’s a very fast-moving field.

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