Wiki vs SharePoint | The Coffeehouse

Bebo
The Misty Dog

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

Keskos

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...

kindohm
Go have fun

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.

Manip

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.

piergiorgio_grossi
PierG

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

Void
A state of nonexistence

What Wiki software are you using?

Bebo
The Misty Dog

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

~Bebo

SpoonsJTD

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.

nigelatkinson

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.

DuNuNuBatman

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.

CodeMonkey666
Cylons.. Why debugging matters

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

arlene.clayton

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.

SCiPS

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.

jlbrainard

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...

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

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.

z2bass
AH!

SharePoint 2007 has a wiki engine

DigitalDud

z2bass wrote:
SharePoint 2007 has a wiki engine

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

z2bass
AH!

Yes, but it is a wiki engine Smiley

oamprimo

I think pretty much has been said previously but I think one can easily miss the point. I assume the technology (wiki or document manager) is the result of an evaluation of needs but some people choose technology no matter what is it for. Result is that they implement a wiki that is not adopted. For instance, Sharepoint is an acclaimed solution among knowledge managers and it becomes THE solution for KM. Digging a bit deeper would show that SharePoint is good to store documents, formalised knowledge. It hardly adressed (007 starts to) idea capture and knowledge sharing. What incidentally blogs and wikis do pretty well.

- Wikis and SharePoint are different tools.
The first one is for collaboration on documents in the process of formalising it. It displays the latest version and keep tracks of any modification. Second one is for storing on-line documents. It is very helpful when documents are already stable. If not, wikis are simpler.

- Wiki is now part of SharePoint
That's cool but it is in line with the progressive integration of blogs, wikis, social bookmark and document managers. We see appearing a new form of groupware. And there is currently a dozen of companies doing that.
Trick is that the wiki in SharePoint is very low profile when it comes to be benchmarked with other wiki solutions. The key element for chosing one system of the other is what is the most important stuff you want. If document management is the key element, then SharePoint is relevant. If not, it might be clever to have a look to a different solution.

- Alternative is to build a solution that meets your requirements. Not being bound by technology is the best way to address issues and tackle them. Mixing excellent blogs, wikis, document managers and social bookmarking and tagging and integrating the whole thing in a single interface is a piece of cake. It's also a good element for adoption: users get the best of every solution which renders the experience better.

At HeadShift we have designed many bespoke solutions for a reasonable price. The KM portal at Allen & Overy is one of these.

crutledge

Is anyone else very disappointed in the Sharepoint implementation of wikis? Our company is trying to move to sharepoint's wiki for collaborative knowledge base maintenance but it has hardly any of the functionality required to make it truly useful.

No one wants to write documentation, but it's a necessity. It seems like a wiki would be the perfect solution because it's easy to use and edit and is almost immediately useful.

I've used MediaWiki in the past and was really impresed how easy it was to get started and start linking and creating headers and etc from some simple key combinations. But the Sharepoint wiki has hardly any functionality. It allows me to create files and do some basic formatting, and I can link from one files to another, but that's about it. No simple formatting, no way to create tables of contents (or at least no way I can see).

Rather than creating a useful collborative document it helps you create a whole bunch of disparate files. There's a big push to start forcing everyone to use this wiki but I'm afraid it's going to cause more problems than it will solve.

Does anyone know of a decent Sharepoint wiki web part?

James M

I like wiki very much for the low barrier to content creation and distributed/collaborative access. Nothing beats wiki for this.

What wiki lacks in my opinion is an out-front navigation system.

Perhaps I'm a bit of a dinosaur in that tagging+search isn't my primary mental model for grokking content. To me, straight wiki is like having a book with only an index and no table of contents.

Without nav, I can't browse - imagine a store where you are met by a gatekeeper that says:

"Tell us where in our store you want to be - then you may enter."

So, I left wiki after some time.

Now, I have to create some shared content again. I've picked up OneNote using a shared notebook on a network share accessible over VPN. Not quite so distributed as HTML/HTTP, but what do I gain?

Navigation: Notebooks/Sections/Pages.

What does it lack?

A tightly coupled discussion space. I really like the discussion page behind every content page - immediate, but not in the way.

Notifications: I liked being notified of new content.

I realize I am perhaps expecting too much from OneNote - I don't think it was intended to be a wiki.

So now, it finally dawned on me (I know, I'm a bit slow) - SharePoint, right? HTML/HTTP, Navigation, Notifications?

If anything I've said makes sense to you and you've used the SharePoint version of wiki - would you post your experience?

Thanks,
-james

Isshou

Since James brought this thread around again...

SharePoint vs Wiki is like comparing a building with a room.

SharePoint does have support for online documents and collaboration, but it also is a portal in which you can manage things like application distribution, workflow processes, and more. Sharepoint is really so much more than what wiki is.

I've never worked with SharePoint myself but the information about it, and the number of extended solution providers for SharePoint servers at the Expo during DevConnections this years, show that it's not just a simple collaboration tool.

Schneider

Confluence is a pretty decent "enterprise" wiki. The latest versions are pretty fully featured, and most interestingly for some of you: it has a SharePoint "connector".

GLHF.

SanK

My company wants to use SharePoint for its intranet solution with connections to Wiki for features involving regular contributions from all users. But we are not sure which would be the best approach to achieve this.

Could anyone of you please give some direction to this newbee!

Thanks,
SanK

BrianLy

Bebo wrote:
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?

You will find things are often slower with SharePoint (I refer to WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) if used out-of-the-box. The wiki implementation has a key feature for beginners, the WYSIWYG editor, but it will be the bane of your existence if most people are advanced users. It lacks features that available in many open source products such as automatic table of contents too. This is simple for MediaWiki or Confluence, but sharepoint doesn't process the markup on the server to allow this kind of functionality.

The based user interface in sharepoint is kind of slow (did you see the size of pages and JS!) and table-based. When replaced with your own lightweight CSS it is a big improvement.

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

If your needs are simple, and you have unstated needs such as management of word documents etc then maybe SharePoint is worth a look. If you are all programmers, why would you look at SharePoint for a wiki?

I would also suggest that you actually try products as opposed to soliciting opinions in forums. Some people have spent a lot of time getting to know these products whilst others can only (mis)quote hearsay or what the product references describe.