MediaWiki is a corporate solution/Enterprise use of MediaWiki

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This is a page for coordinating various community efforts for using MediaWiki in a corporate/enterprise/organizational setting.

MediaWiki is a simple, powerful and free solution to product a wiki web site in an enterprise.

  1. No fee to the MediaWiki development community,
  2. No fee to the server softwares using open-source Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP,
  3. Design to distinguish IT role, responsible of servers (backup, accessibility, security, upgrade) and wiki-administration role, responsible of the wiki functionalities and behavior (appearance, user rights, user preferences, javascripts, maintenance).
  4. Design to product wiki families. (E.g. a top wiki for first level information connected to further restricted specialist wikis).
  5. Design to be easily extended and easily developed. 1,555 extensions have already being produced, such as LDAP Authentication,
See Sites using MediaWiki/corporate
See: Manual:Industrialization guide to industrialize your wiki-web-site production.

Contents

[edit] Enterprise MediaWiki Resources

As of this writing (2006?), we're still in the formative stages of trying to build an enterprise MediaWiki community, following up from an Enterprise MediaWiki BOF at Wikimania 2006. It's not clear that it entirely makes sense to have a community defined that is independent of the general MediaWiki community, but it's good to have that discussion.

Mailing List
A mailing list was created in August, 2006 to discuss enterprise issues. It's currently a low traffic list, so feel free to join and introduce yourself:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-enterprise archive
IRC
There's not a dedicated IRC channel to enterprise issues, but the best thing to do if you'd like to discuss this is to pop onto the #mediawiki IRC channel to discuss. Make sure that robla is paying attention if he's logged on (for example, by typing "/msg robla there's enterprise stuff on #mediawiki")
Other channels
See the MediaWiki Communication page for more options.

[edit] Issues for MediaWiki in the enterprise

See: Manual:Industrialization guide to industrialize your wiki-web-site production.
See Manual:System administration to get everything about MediaWiki system administration.

Below are issues for users of MediaWiki in an enterprise setting. Some issues below aren't typically a problem for public Internet deployments of MediaWiki, while others are, but may not be as acute as they are for enterprise users.

[edit] Authentication

Most public Internet deployments of MediaWiki use the standard authentication database as configured in MediaWiki. However, enterprise deployments typically need to tie into the corporate login structure. Here's some resources that help you deal with that:

  • Ryan Lane's LDAP Authentication plugin - since LDAP systems are so common in enterprise systems.
  • AuthPlugin interface - generic interface for creating new authentication plugins.

[edit] Limiting access

See Manual:Preventing access

Here are just a few examples of ways of accessing content:

  • Page transclusion
  • Export hooks
  • Page history
  • Searching

If page names are meant to be confidential (e.g. "super secret contract between Foo Corp. and Bar Corp."), that just makes matters worse.

One suggestion from the Wikimania BOF:

You might set up a hot mirror. Point authors at the master wiki with htaccess protection, point users at a read-only mirrors. Once you set it up, maintenance is trivial. This tells how to mirror the OpenZaurus wiki: http://wiki.openzaurus.org/Admin/MirrorHowto . You may be able to adapt these instructions to set up your own master and any number of read-only mirrors. My mirrors update nightly; updates up to every 10 minutes should be feasible depending on the number and size of your pages. Contact me if you have any questions: mailto://bronson@rinspin.com

One subject for discussion on the mediawiki-enterprise mailing list is what interfaces could be added to the code such that an ACL-maniac extension to MediaWiki could exist, without a big support burden on the core team. [1]

[edit] External Authorization plugins

[edit] New distribution mechanisms

  • Debian package for MediaWiki
  • RPM (?)
  • Does a PEAR distribution make sense?
  • Does it make sense to package MediaWiki extensions as .deb/.rpm/PEAR thingies?
  • I mentioned automating maintaining multiple instances using svk during the talk. It works well. I will try to write an article about it in the next few days; check http://u32.net or bug me: bronson@rinspin.com
  • New distribution mechanisms. There's already a Debian package for

MediaWiki, I'm assuming there's an RPM out there. Does a PEAR distribution make sense? Does it make sense to package MediaWiki extensions as .deb/.rpm/PEAR thingies?

[edit] Structured data in enterprise use

  • Structured data - I know that in my last job, there were several things we used a wiki in lieu of a database for (e.g. we kept a list of new licensees of our technology on a wiki). It was nice, because we had the flexibility to add fields willy-nilly. So, it may be interesting to discuss the enterprise applicability of projects like

[edit] Easy editing with WYSIWYG editing

See Category:WYSIWYG extensions and especially Extension:FCKeditor (Official)


[edit] Other stuff

[edit] Enterprise Content Management System

[edit] Platform solutions

Alfresco Server
MediaWiki in Alfresco environment
SharePoint Server
MediaWiki in SharePoint environment
OmCollab platform
OmCollab is a bundle with MediaWiki, Wordpress, bookmarks and forum. (See also: MediaWiki LocalSettings on OmCollab installation)