Enterprise use of MediaWiki

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.


 * See Sites using MediaWiki/corporate
 * See: Manual:Industrialization guide to industrialize your wiki-web-site production.

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.

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.

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.

Limiting access

 * See Manual:Preventing access

External Authorization plugins

 * What this means: being able to manage group memberships in external database rather than in internal database
 * Not really being done (?)
 * How to do it: override User.php?
 * Other hooks?
 * OpenID is in MediaWiki svn. It's live at http://wikitravel.org/review/Special:OpenIDLogin
 * Page by Page Access Control using Access Control Extension for MediaWiki · PageSecurity extension. See Category:Page specific user rights extensions

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

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?
 * New distribution mechanisms. There's already a Debian package for

Structured data in enterprise use

 * Wikidata
 * Semantic MediaWiki
 * Wikicalc http://softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/


 * 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

Easy editing with WYSIWYG editing

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

Other stuff

 * Marking stable/approved versions of articles: ''see Category:Rating extensions and especially Extension:Drafts
 * Training
 * Possibility to replicate to a local system. This is needed to Consultants with no access from the customersite to the Company Wiki: see Manual:Moving a wiki
 * MediaWiki as a Document Management System: Version management, archiving, search, categorization...
 * Navigation: see Category:Navigation extensions and especially Extension:Hierarchy

Platform solutions

 * Alfresco Server
 * MediaWiki in Alfresco environment


 * SharePoint Server
 * MediaWiki in SharePoint environment