Recently in Wikis Category

Shortly after I posted about IceCore, I noticed that there was a VMWare image available on their website. That was the easiest way to get going with IceCore, so I fired it up on VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I did have some problems connecting at first. It turned out that the image was only listening to eth0 and my connection was being detected on eth1. I went to edit the network settings, but alas my favorite editor (nano) was not in the image. I limped through vi, and got the settings to work, and poof there was IceCore.

In terms of features, I think IceCore has the perfect (and I do mean perfect) mix. It is easy to create new groups ("Teams") of users to work on projects, and then provide them with a common set of tools that includes Blogs, Calendar, Discussion, Files, Milestones, Surveys, Tasks and a Wiki. This is great combination of tools



There is tons of ajaxy responsiveness in IceCore (note that the proprietary version goes by "Novel Teaming"). But the UI design needs some work. Threaded discussion take up a lot more space than they need to, and some of the features and layout will not be obvious to novice users.

These shortcomings sent me in search of related projects, when I found Liferay. At first, I couldn't tell the difference between Liferay and IceCore, but then Liferay did an update to version 5.0 and I was able to tell them apart. It turns out that IceCore is built on (the earlier version) of Liferay. Both have a similar portal display that allows you to add lots of widgets (both internal "portlets" as well as external sites and google gadgets).



It does add quite a number of features that facilitate working in teams, but much of the underlying functionality remains. There are numerous bundles of Liferay available, and I chose a bundle with Tomcat 5, which simply required me to run a start script. This uses hsqldb (which is fine for testing) and also installed a lot of sample data (which users on the forums have told me how to get rid of if I choose to continue with Liferay).

The new release of Liferay (which I assume IceCore will eventually incorporate) makes some welcome changes. For example, this is how threaded discussions appear in Liferay 5.



While this is how it appears in IceCore



Notice the popup frame that I'm sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't how much discussion forums work. New users like to have familiar functionality.

Similarly, this is how you see Wikis in Liferay.



And this is how you edit them.



These are pretty straightforward. But IceCore adds additional complexity with a Wiki that takes up more space, multiple views that are confusing and popup frames.



But where IceCore shines is in having all of the functionality that is needed in a one step install. Liferay is missing tasks most importantly. These could probably be added with a portlet, though I couldn't find one that was free and easy to integrate. IceCore also makes it really easy to manage teams. Liferay has similar functionality in Communities, but the Teams, along with the spaces that get created for them, are easier from an admin perspective.

I've seen some new UI designs for IceCore in their forums, and if they follow through on those and then build on the new Liferay, I think they'll have a real winner. Still, at this point in time IceCore is one of the best products I've seen. Speaking of which Chronopolys has gone 1.0 final and now includes an easy installer. I've also started looking at the community edition of Alfresco which has some new collaboration features in there. I'll try that next (after I can get it to install - it has been fighting with Liferay).

Deki Wiki just went to a 1.9a release. And finally reverse proxying works on the standard Vmware image install. A quick install, IP configuration and simple apache reverse proxying configuration (see the bug report) and it was off and running. I renamed the server, which meant further email configuration, but that was it. With Deki Wiki installed I took the chance to play around with it a little. It comes with some very slick skins.



Editing pages via WYSIWYG is very easy. The new version has preliminary support for FCKeditor and TinyMCE in addition to the default editor. The default editor still has the most support for features, and the fewest bugs, but it doesn't work with Safari. I tried the FCKeditor, and it worked fine. The editor floats on the web page, which causes some problems, but it is just experimental for now.

Editing pages, creating links and uploading media is straightforward. I'd put Deki Wiki as my clear choice for Wikis at this point.

Redmine

I've been searching for a project management/trouble ticket system. So far I'm voting for Eventum, which I have configured to manage bugs and features. It accepts incoming requests via email, which is great and it was quite easy to configure. It does one thing and it does it well. But I've been hoping I might find a system that can handle tickets as well as a few additional project management features. Trac is a popular choice, and I'm going to evaluate that further. Redmine is a similar Ruby-based tool, with support for some additional features and multiple projects. I added it to my previous Ruby install following the instructions. Configuration was easy except I never got the external svn repository working. I'm not sure if it was just me or a more fundamental bug. Otherwise, the tool was quite well set up.



But in the end the features of the issue tracking weren't as good as Eventum, and the other features (Documents, Files, Milestones) weren't as good as the best of breed for these tasks. I'd rather have great issue tracking and handle the project management features elsewhere.

I got pretty close with DekiWiki, but it never made it all the way to working with the Apache Reverse Proxy. Along with a number of other posts on Opengarden forums, it seems like getting DekiWiki to work across an Apache reverse proxy is non-trivial or impossible in the current state. It works just fine for viewing posts without pictures, but any of the URLs that include @api fail. This may have something to do with the fact that DekiWiki itself uses a reverse proxy on those calls to forward it internally to port 8081. So while I like DekiWiki and the community behind it, I have temporarily abandoned it in favor of...

Xwiki
I went back to the Wikimatrix in search of another good open source WYSIWYG wiki and found Xwiki.

Xwiki had an easy to use self-contained version that I was able to quickly and easily install on my server. It turns out that a few days later that version was updated, and updating that version is not straightforward. I had to take the new zip version and copy out the necessary directories to avoid writing over my previous data. But after that I was updated. Then I went and added the start script to my startup scripts, added some Apache rules, and all was well.

Xwiki is a good looking Wiki with useful WYSIWYG editing functions and very access, group and user control.



I found the access control particular straightforward and well implemented.



The WYSIYWG editing isn't particularly fancy, it is just an adapted version of TinyMCE, but it works well enough. The only incident I had was when adding some Flash to a page via HTML. It lost the HTML when I went back and forth from Wikicode to WYSIWYG.

But in most other ways Xwiki performed just fine. It allowed comments and attachments with ease.



Xwiki seems to have a reasonable community, but not the development that DekiWiki has going on. I was also disappointed to find only a mailing list (with archives) for Xwiki and no forum. The archives are fine for searching for particular problems, but less easy to just browse to learn more as a newbie to the system. Still, one of the better wikis for novices that I have found, and one that I'll be continuing to test.

While updates haven't been very frequent (to say the least), that doesn't mean I have stopped my obsession with collaboration. My two latest efforts are an update to Zimbra 5.0 (in both the FOSS edition and the paid edition), and a start with DekiWiki. While both of these experiences brought with them some installation and upgrade pitfalls, I am overall impressed with both products.

Zimbra 5.0.1 I have been using Zimbra for over a year now. Zimbra's purchase by Yahoo hasn't had a noticeable impact on the product (if you discount the "accidental" inclusion of a Yahoo search feature in one of the new skins). I use the FOSS version of Zimbra on a RHEL 4 VMware virtual machine at home, and the commercial version on a RHEL4 server at work. Both are great, and this update actually brings the functionality of the commercial and FOSS versions closer together.

Version 5.0 introduces many new features. Most notable among them are full-fledged CalDav support, a briefcase that provides a useful interface to online documents, much more flexible sharing, IM, tasks and a totally reworked infrastructure that feels a lot snappier. The interface itself has some more polish, but is fairly similar to 4.5, with the exception of the inclusion of an iPhone/iPod Touch interface that is fantastic.

From a Mac User's perspective I think the biggest update is great CalDav integration with iCal for Mac OS X 10.5. When I first fired up my Mac after updating the server to 5.0.1, iCal somehow detected that I was connected to CalDav server (presumably through my email client settings) and just set up the CalDav client. I thought that all my old events had been duplicated with the iSync conduit, but in fact they were there twice because the old iSync calendar was turned on as was the new CalDav version. Subsequently I have turned off the iSync conduit for calendar and only use it with Address Book.

There are still quite a number of small bugs, judging by the traffic on the forums. I ran into one that threw me for a loop for a few hours after upgrading both servers. The major change in architecture (from Tomcat to Jetty) seems to have resulted in a change in the way that certificates are handled, and migrating certificates from 4.5.X to 5.0 and 5.0.1 has not gone well. I ran into this problem as well. It turned out I needed to destroy my old certificates for all to work well in the end. But the forums are very active and it didn't take long to figure that out.

Outlook still requires the Exchange substitute that comes with the commercial version (though there are works on progress providing CalDav support in Outlook). Though on Windows one could use the Sunbird calendar. There is also a beta of a plugin for Evolution on Linux.

Overall Zimbra is top notch for a mail and calendar server and seems to be the most platform agnostic of any I have found.


Deki Wiki I'm still in the early stages of experimenting with DekiWiki. Deki Wiki is the most novice-friendly wiki that I've found. It is very polished, provides a WYSIWYG interface for editing, supports attachments, and sophisticated permissions. While there are a number of "WYSIWYG" wikis, most of them feel like (probably because they are) grafts of WYSIWYG editors onto standard wiki format text boxes. This is not the case for Deki Wiki where WYSIWYG feels central.

The architecture for Deki Wiki is a bit unusual. It is your standard LAMP (WAMP) with the additional requirement of Mono/.Net 2.0. This is a very strange thing to do IMHO. It means that it isn't quite at home on either Linux or Windows. I had stayed away from it for this reason for some time. But now they make an easy to install and update VMware image that you can just drop in. I thought that was my opportunity to give it a whirl.

Configuration for running on a LAN was a breeze. It was essentially a wizard setup. Follow a few prompts and log in to the DHCP assigned address. The End. Turning this into an Internet accessible server, was then a bit of a chore. Some command line tools to change to a static IP which was well documented on the site. I also used an additional pointer from the forums. I didn't want to use up a real IP address, so I set about learning Apache Proxy (and reverse proxy) procedures. I found this tutorial and this one really helpful. This got me 90% of the way there, but some links weren't being rewritten correctly, until I found documentation on ProxyHTMLLinks, which was missing.

Success! At least for most operations. I'm still troubleshooting and experimenting and will try to offer a more complete review soon.

Since my last post (in addition to working on a book for my other job) I've been hammering away on deployments of Zimbra. After quite a bit of testing I decided I liked it enough to deploy the Network Edition (paid) at work for a small workgroup, and at the open source edition at home for my family. One thing that didn't become apparent until I actually started working on these servers in production was that the default spam settings were a little weak. Fortunately there was additional documentation on the Zimbra wiki, as well as user contributions in the forums and on the wiki. I've found that there are a few rough spots (e.g. switching from http only mode to https mode broke smtp authentication). But the forums are active (although occasionally contentious) and help abounds. The open source edition is quite comprehensive, and other than lacking syncing, rendering of attachments in html (which is actually quite handy on the road), mobile capabilities and some scaling capabilities, it matches the paid version quite closely.

I've also been putting ActiveCollab through its paces on one of our projects and users have been pleased.

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While I haven't had the chance to do some of my comprehensive evaluations on Wikis and Collanos (next on my to do), I have had a chance to tinker with some hosted tools that have been receiving a fair bit of press. Here are some quick overviews of a few of those tools.

Wetpaint
I am definitely in the market for a more usable wiki. I'm not sure why there is this anti-WYSIWYG bias in the wiki community, but it seems to be there. However, with wikis headed for the enterprise (for example see the Lotusphere announcements from last week) I think they're going to have to become a lot more user friendly. Wetpaint has to be at the top of the user friendly list. Wetpaint is a wiki designed for individuals, workgroups and small clubs/organizations. It is simple and slick. It is very Web 2.0, but it wears it well. At its heart is a simple ability to create and edit pages.



The edit this page link is always right there and brings up a simple ajaxy editing toolbar. That in and of itself is a reason to think about using wetpaint. But it gets a lot of other things right too. Adding a new page is done by... hitting the "add new page" button. And when you add that page it appears in a navigation menu so that you don't lose it. To link to that page you can easily find it using the link tool in the editing toolbar. This is the way wikis should work.

It does go a little overboard with the use of widgets, but I can imagine that these will evolve and could prove to be quite useful.



Wetpaint also easily facilitates sharing and commenting with others. You can choose to keep your wiki public or private, and weetpaint is free and ad supported. I have not found any ads to be obtrusive, in fact on my sites I haven't seen them at all. Wetpaint seems hard to beat, but I'll be trying to check out DekiWiki soon.


Koral
Koral is another Web 2.0 site. Its mission is sharing of documents, and again it does it simply and well in Web 2.0 style.



It is a well laid out site for uploading and sharing documents. You upload and publish content that you share with groups of people divided up into different workspaces. The interface makes it easy to get documents online, choose with whom you want to share them, and keep it all organized. Its one flaw may be that it is solely document focused. This likely means it would have to be used as one tool among many. This isn't necessarily bad, it means that there isn't a lot of feature creep or confusion about how to do thousands of different things. Perhaps it could be paired well with Wrike (see below). Right now Koral is hosted and free.


Wrike
I have to laugh just a bit every time I look at the Wrike page. Not because it isn't a good tool, but because it buys in a bit too much to the Web 2.0 thing. If you've read some of the sites spoofing Web 2.0 they'll tell you what you really need to do to be Web 2.0 is use certain colors, use particular fonts, make sure your logo has a reflection, and be sure to label it "beta". Well Wrike complies with all of these.



But beyond that it seems like the start of an interesting product. Wrike is a project management tool focused on tasks. Users create tasks and assign and notify others about these tasks. These tasks can be managed via a combination of web interface and the user's own email. The latter is what makes Wrike unique. It facilitates emailing in of information as well as notification out about tasks. Once tasks are initiated users can add documents, comments and updates to them in a relatively easy fashion. I have to admit that I haven't tried Wrike first hand, as the couple of times that I tried to create an account, it has been "down". Presumably they're in rapid update mode, and I will give it a whirl when they let me (or when it is out of beta). Right now Wrike is free.