Deki Wiki Intro - CMS and Wiki features in any enviornment

We’ve been trialing Deki Wiki a bit in a pilot group lately. What’s DekiWiki? Well, at a glance, it’s a CMS platform - targeted at the wiki-space (Microsoft’s case study). If you’ve used Windows SharePoint Services - WSS 3.0 Wiki-features, think about that. If you haven’t, then think Wikipedia. For us, the need is knowledge transfer and some versioning – both on the dev side and IT pro side. So, without a huge time investment we put together a small group to look at the two WSS and DekiWiki side-by-side. Turns out DekiWiki got everyone’s attention and buy-in more quickly. WSS definitely does a lot of stuff – and it’s not that we won’t use it for our team spaces– but everyone really liked DekiWiki’s Wiki features.

Why is DekiWiki good? Well, it’s built on Mono. Yes, that Mono, the .NETish one that runs Visual Studio binaries without recompiling. Internally, our test box is running Linux in a guest instance under Virtual Server, but you can install it on Windows/IIS as well. Is it AD integrated? Yes. So, yes, SBSers it integrates just as easily into SBS enviornments, and we can all install it, deploy it, and leverage it in our client base. Does it all work automagically? Well, no, not exactly. But it’s not terribly difficult to be up and running in short order. What’s more – it’s got a complete API and can be extended by lots of languages –and it’s free.