Yes, installation of MindTouch Deki Wiki, when one does not use the VMware Certified image, was once difficult; however, MindTouch now provides RPMs for all major Linux distros, you can find these here: http://wiki.mindtouch.com/Official_MindTouch_Deki_Wiki_Installation_Guides . With the RPMS and the our install guides installation is a snap.

As long as I’m commenting again, I’ll reiterate since this post was never updated: MindTouch Deki Wiki does support groups, both internal and external (LDAP/AD). Moreover, MindTouch Deki Wiki provides the most granular permissioning with 64bit user roles.

Thanks for reviewing PBwiki. Our business offering includes the first three seats for free and seats after that at $8/user/mo. So five seats should be $16/mo for you and comes with 10GB, not 10MB. Email sales@pbwiki.com if you’re having any issues with getting set up and we’ll take care of you right away.

Cheers,
David Weekly (Founder & CEO of PBwiki)

The open source solutions, such as those offered by our webhost, are clunky and way over the top. Way to many functions and not user friendly for reducing learning curves for new users. Others, such as Twiki and DekiWiki were “intense” to install…it would take me days to complete it, and then to manage all the upgrades to servers, databases etc. There really wasn’t a good option.

SAAS offerings:
Looked at http://www.pbwiki.com, http://www.brainkeeper.com, http://www.wetpaint.com, http://www.atlassian.com, http://www.wikispaces.com and http://www.centraldesktop.com.

http://www.pbwiki.com: good function and easy to use, and I liked it. The problem that I ran into, is the storage space. The website states 10GB, but after signing up, they only really offer 10MB. The software is great, but 10MB of storage makes it useless. If you want more storage space…you have to pay per GB and it gets expensive…really fast.

http://www.brainkeeper.com: I really liked as well. Biggest downside is that making the wiki public, or having a portion public is not possible. I need that for the support section of our wiki. Still researching this though.

I am still considering trying out a few others, but wikispaces is just spendy for us, as we’re only going to have a limited number of users. Again, storage space is an issue with centraldesktop…get spendy quickly. Going to look into wetpaint…but security of the entire wiki seems that it might pose a problem.

In short, the option in the SAAS arena for small businesses, with few users and reasonable storage space are few. Where is the one that offers 10GB of space (reasonable), a few users 3-5, and is competitively priced ($15-$20) a month? Any suggestions.

Note: Thanks Aaron Fulkerson for the tip on http://wik.is. I really liked what I saw in DekiWiki…but installation was a straight up test of stamina and determination…

I have no clue why they made the architecture so complicated and so unintuitive. Possible reason could be “Business” with “Open Source Tag”. I hear they are making lot of money, but I dont find much of interest to work with that.

Their customer service - I had pain……
The Team is so much distributed — I felt Atlassian is not a company but a million sub-companies taking their shares on the name of “OPEN SOURCE” “FREE” tags all the way. I think they should come up with more professional commercial wiki solution than what they are today.
I see least commitment. Their forums - Horrible. No replies.

Its back end is bad…I tried linking it to MySql, it doesnot scale up at all. They dont help either, but they demand upfront.

I need to try out PBWiki.
Of all, Twiki, Jotspot, PmWiki, PhpWiki, MediaWiki, Confluence
I liked simple PmWiki and PhpWiki. Currenly I am developing my own wiki for my needs.

Prasad.

We’ve been using Confluence for about two years now and it’s going great. This is not to say that is not without its issues, and you have addressed them very well here, but overall, I think if you had a bit more time perhaps, from a systems & services management point of view I fell it is quite excellent (not withstanding silly UI issues).

We have found that Confluence works best when users are managed though Active Directory, eDirectory or Open LDAP, i.e. any directory service etc and allows (in the case of eDirectory anyhow) us to manage group permissions on the fly using dynamic groups. Don’t bother using its own user db, its too much hassle and I don’t want yet another web admin interface to add more users and try and sync accounts, its too messy. But Confluence is aimed at the Enterprise market more so than other WIKI software and I think its fair to assume that most enterprises will have some type of directory service somewhere.

Take up was slow, and in fact has not been a 100% or near, but I think a lot of that has to do with our dislike of writing things down and not having a sharing and caring mentality rather than the software even withs its weird UI.

I am beginning to form the opinion that confluence is probably best as a developer tool, given its close integration with Jira. That being said it can perform quite well as an enterprise wiki.

On the bright side, I must blog a howto on this myself, you can use apaches mod_proxy_ajp or mod_proxy if you have the time to configure it, to allow it to coexist on port 80/443 for all to access, but as you said you had a short amount of time and this is again not ideal for every setup. (Why should you have to add modules if you have enterprise software…)

Finally, another wiki/collab software, and one to watch out for, is Jive Software Clearspace (They also produce an excellent Jabber server)… if only Confluence had some of its features and vice versa, I am sure you would have been happy. Best of luck in Spain.

http://collegemogul.com

Check out our wiki in the Resources section!

Bill

The PBWiki hosted solution was familiar to us and cheaper than the hosted Twiki alternative (twiki.net).

No other reason than that tbh.