Building a Wiki

[3oneday]

Is there anyone here who has the skill set to create a Wiki for the business that I work for?

I am looking to have something created which I would have called an Intranet but apparently could be a Wiki instead these days.

For background, we are a Legal Corp with 60 odd staff. We need to inform the staff of law and document changes and various other things, but I'd also like to be able to use it for HR functions, primarily leave requests and subsequent display of leave rosters (in the vain hope that the staff can work out for themselves that they can't have the leave that they want :)).

I have asked our own IT, but generally they only reply when they know how to do something :) I am really wanting to understand the cost in creating something like this?

Cheers,
Pete

[coalesce]

The answer to this is going to depend on the competence of your IT dept to support it after whoever you might get in to set anything up has gone away (assuming you woudln't want a support contract with the whoever).

Would your IT be up to installing Sharepoint? That would give you document storage and versioning and can also have wikis, reports, etc. Probably a good option if your IT dept already has some kind of relationship with Microsoft (for support etc - although there's plenty online too - and it would be easy to find contractors to come in and do stuff for you)

There's probably a load of other (possibly cheaper) options out there, but again, it will likely fall on your IT dept to support them...

[PerryGroves]

I have nothing to help you 3, only the wish that your next business no HR and no IT department.

[3oneday]

I have nothing to help you 3, only the wish that your next business no HR and no IT department.only if I start mowing lawns for a living probably :)

Thanks coalesce.

[LarryLong]

I would recommend two options.

- Atlassian Confluence is a wiki that is powerful and quite user friendly. It can be hosted in the cloud or on site by your IT department, and it has an 'app store' setup with a bunch of plugins that you can add to the system to extend the platform. Easy to give accounts to external parties, although you have to pay for it. Atlassian is an Australian company too, if that means anything at all.
- Sharepoint is probably not quite as user friendly to set up and is more focused on documents, but it's a well known solid product and there's plenty of support around if you need to support or extend it. Agree with coalesce's assessment. Office 365 is starting to pick up some momentum and this should result in some interesting things coming along.

I would say that if you're document-centric and you want things like version control, co-editing documents and integration with microsoft tools, look at Office365. If you're after a more free-form page-based wiki with users contributing as a community (with the ability to add a layer of access control over the top), look at Confluence. Actually, look at both and evaluate them against your requirements, of course.

There are other wiki platforms available as well. I just think those two are pretty good options if you're looking to start something off.

[3oneday]

Sharepoint is $17 per user per month?

Thanks LL, I am convincing the gang to look more seriously at an Intranet hopefully.

[Hatchman]

Would Google Dive/Docs suit your purpose?
We'd be lost without it.

[BenM]

Sharepoint isn't that dear (you may be looking at the licences with Office & Exchange included), but I would second Confluence, it's a great product. Cheap, not free for an organisation your size, but well worth it. MediaWiki (the same as Wikipedia use) is also good. And I think I've used TikiWiki in the past. Sharepoint is powerful but (just my opinion) it's a beast of a thing, the learning curve will be steeper, and I hate it.

It is not (in my opinion but I am technical) difficult to setup any of them once the actual installation side of things is done though. And you can easily enough get them hosted in the cloud so you don't have to deal with that stuff yourself.

[markTHEblake]

any idiot can create a wiki, and can be done for free easily. I could create an empty wiki (< see previous point) on one of my servers in less than 5 minutes. I am sure your mob has a linux server amongst their boxes.

Creating the content, and getting it into some sort of usable style and getting all the contributors using it effectively, and and thats not an IT job, which is probably why they are not interested.