Wiki vs SharePoint

I am really into wiki. I have installed a wiki for our developers at work with great success. Nothing is easier and faster to propogate information and ideas.

The company I work for wants to start using a SharePoint site. It thinks that this will be the cure for information sharing. I am skeptical, but I don't have any experience with SharePoint so I don't really know. It looks like it has a ton of cool features, but how practical is it?

So, if you had to put SharePoint head to head with a good Wiki implementation, who would win?

I'd like to hear your thoughts and experiences. Thanks!

~Bebo

Comparing Wiki with SharePoint is like comparing NotePad with Word.

Regarding the complexity of SharePoint I don't have much experience, but once you setup everything, it is much more effective than a wiki. There are so cool visual tricks there, like moving web parts around and so on. You can experience how sharepoint feels online, search it and you will find plenty of them.

Wiki is not a bad solution, wikipedia is one example, but sharepoint definitely increases productivity significantly.

SharePoint is something I wish I could build, it is almost everything I was imagining when I was thinking the ultra utopic content management system. They took care of almost all the details. It is component based, you can build web parts, desktop integration is great, office integration is great. Its interface is great.

The only question you should really focus on is how easy to install and deploy, that's something I am not aware of. Also you need to make sure that the goal fits the sharepoint. Sharepoint is really great when people share office documents, but for sharing simple ideas I don't see why you can't use wiki. Wikis are used to brainstorm in many projects. With sharepoint you probably can get something like wiki, but in addition to that you have other tools like discussion boards etc...

Sharepoint 2003 (WSS and SPS) also integrates with Office 2003.  You can control your SPS or WSS content from Word or Excel. 

SPS and WSS are also easy to use by non-technical folks - they don't need to know any HTML or code to use, create and work with WSS sites and web parts. 

You can't really compare Sharepoint and Wikkies they simply do different things.

SharePoint is more like PHP-Nuke, a portal but a super-advanced portal. It supports graphs and has the ability to display office documents and other rich media. It allows you to lay out a corp. web-site in a few minutes and share information but more fixed information than that which is constantly changing. However you could add one or more wikies to your SharePoint site.

If your company has a really ugly, hard to use site or a site where information isn't being put on there then I would suggest looking into SharePoint. If however you just think it is like a Wiki upgrade then it is a waste of money and you will end up moving back to a wiki quickly.

In our team, we are experiencing the same configuration: wiki + sharepoint.
We use the wiki as our backbone with a lot of links to sharepoint where we store more 'official' data like: spec, diagrams, release notes ...
PierG

What Wiki software are you using?

I had used http://www.openwiki.com for a long time, but now we are using http://www.flexwiki.com.

~Bebo

Manip wrote:

You can't really compare Sharepoint and Wikkies they simply do different things.

SharePoint is more like PHP-Nuke, a portal but a super-advanced portal. It supports graphs and has the ability to display office documents and other rich media. It allows you to lay out a corp. web-site in a few minutes and share information but more fixed information than that which is constantly changing. However you could add one or more wikies to your SharePoint site.

I know I'm way late to this party, but I just found this thread by way of www.flexwiki.com.

Don't confuse SharePoint Portal Services with Windows SharePoint Services. While you might be able to characterize SPS somewhat like you described, WSS is very much about providing a mechanism for accessing info that changes constantly.

Overall though, it is somewhat of an apples to oranges comparison. I find a wiki to be really good for collaboration on text-based content, where SharePoint really excels at collaboration at a higher level by effectively providing strongly typed mechanisms for information that people might typically use a wiki for, such as discussions, tasks, and contacts. I think the best solution is a combination and tight integration of the two, with SharePoint providing the environment and a wiki complimenting it by providing the 'strongly typed' mechanism for collaboration on text-based (and linked) content.

You no longer have to choose. My company has just released WikiPoint, a wiki implementation for SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Take a look at http://www.neoworks.com/r/wikipoint

We use it for managing and sharing loosely structured and frequently updated information within our portal.

I think that the new version of sharepoint server will have wiki capabilities built right into it. It might be a good idea to keep what you have and upgrade at a later date and get the best of both.

WSS3.0 has a wiki built right in. We have been using it a lot. You can hot link SP list and the like..

Does anyone know a good Wiki Software that will run as a web part for SharePoint portal 2003 and services? I would like to run a wiki with SharePoint.

I was using media wiki since 2 years. This year our company decided that we must put everything in Sharepoint...

The wiki in sharepoint WSS 3.0 is really bad and really weak compared to media wiki. (No category, no TOC, no file upload inside, ... nothing)

Do you know a free wiki part for sharepoint or should I do that my self?

Because the neo stuff is 3000$ and this is far too much.

Socialtext offers a wiki solution that offers the best of both worlds... a standalone feature-rich WYSIWYG wiki collaboration environment for non-MSFT shops, as well as an integration done specifically to plug the wiki INSIDE of the Microsoft environment IN Sharepoint and integrated WITH Active Directory...

Socialtext offers some cool features around mobile wiki access, spreadsheets inside a wiki (called Socialcalc) plus an ability to use the wiki off-line and then re-connect and synch your data later. Socialtext also offers all the expected integration with email for notification, publishing to the wiki via email, RSS and weblog integration, plus tagging and search.

IF you want to try it out, Socialtext offers FREE 30-day trials of its wiki solution available here - http://www.socialtext.com/trial/1

You can also download an open-source or VMware option here - http://www.socialtext.net/stoss/index.cgi

Give Socialtext a try. It's already used by over 2000 customers...

We recently acquired Sharepoint 2003 at my workplace. Let me give you some advice: Hire a Sharepoint guy, or make sure one of your IT guys has Sharepoint experience. We've got four main portals and only one of their sub-admins has actually done anything with it.

These are people who look at pie charts for a living and think they can make websites out of them. Sadly, now, they can; with tools like Sharepoint Designer (Read: FrontPage with a few plugins), they can easily drag and drop to their collective hearts' content.

Until someone unwittingly changes a few things on the template. Saved it, closed it, can't undo. Nobody made a backup. Now all the 'My Pages' look like that. The installation was poorly planned, the database is a disaster. They're waxin' their modems tryin' to make 'em go faster. </lyrics>

If your organization rolls out Sharepoint, and nobody's really in charge of it and nobody knows wtf they're doing, it can end up looking like a bunch of FrontPage sites that were all made from the same template.

Oh yeah, and don't even get me started on the user rights management. We've got readers who can write and administrators who can't read.

Hilarity ensues.

SharePoint 2007 has a wiki engine

z2bass wrote:

 SharePoint 2007 has a wiki engine

So it's a $35,000 wiki engine.

Yes, but it is a wiki engine