BlueSpice

BlueSpice is an open source MediaWiki enterprise distribution. It enhances MediaWiki, in particular in the following areas: quality management, process support, administration, rights management, editing, security, and social content. BlueSpice is used worldwide as a platform for collaborative knowledge management, as a knowledge base in customer support and as an uncomplicated tool for documentation and handbooks.

Objective
The development of the BlueSpice distributions serves the following goals:


 * To make MediaWiki available to less tech-savvy user groups: spreading MediaWiki's unique collaboration approach beyond Wikimedia by providing an open source solution for organizations and businesses as an alternative to proprietary systems.
 * To promote the open-source idea and culture: development under free licenses; faster, user-oriented development; transparent software development and increase of data security; and development of new ideas and approaches within a lively developer community
 * To solve well-known MediaWiki maintainer problems: reducing the effort of continuous maintenance of extensions; ensuring continuous development and bug fixing; integrating features (e.g., SemanticMediaWiki); unifying the code base; improving acceptance through better usability, meeting compliance requirements (e.g., EU GDPR, accessibility); offering adaptability and scalability; providing continuous documentation.

Financing
Since 2015, BlueSpice development has been financed by a subscription model based on the models SuSE Linux and Red Hat Linux. Within the framework of this model, different editions and service contracts are provided. The edition BlueSpice free is the smallest edition, the commercial editions BlueSpice pro and BlueSpice farm bundle additional functions that meet the requirements of larger organizations (management system, documentation, manual, knowledge base). But the software of the commercial editions is also published and is under free licenses to make it available for the MediaWiki developer community.

Editions
BlueSpice is distributed in three editions: free, pro and farm. All BlueSpice editions are based on MediaWiki.

BlueSpice bundles numerous extensions. Many of them are written and maintained by Hallo Welt!. Besides this, there are many extensions from third-party developers part of the BlueSpice distribution. The current volume of the different distributions is described in the official BlueSpice software catalog.

BlueSpice free
BlueSpice free is an entry level solution for businesses, but it is also intended as a free ready-made solution for non-profit organizations. It adds lots of user-friendly features and supplements it with a multitude of helpful functions for teams and small businesses.

These functions includeː


 * an optimized user interface design,
 * high-performance search (Elasticsearch),
 * rights management,
 * improved system security, and
 * integration and connection options via an API.

BlueSpice pro
BlueSpice pro is the business-critical solution with comprehensive functionalities, a growing number of available extensions and long-term support – updates and patches are also included. It is available as BlueSpice pro Cloud and On Premises.

The additional functions to BlueSpice free includeː


 * quality assurance,
 * working with approvals,
 * PDF manuals with export function,
 * semantic features for working with forms and meta information, and
 * a blog and comment function for team collaboration.

BlueSpice farm
BlueSpice farm is a scalable solution for creating and managing multiple wikis on one server.

The additional functions to BlueSpice pro includeː


 * one-click installation of new wiki instances
 * push & merge
 * language selection
 * extended search

Downloads
BlueSpice free can be downloaded from the following sourcesː


 * BlueSpice website
 * All-in-one Docker image

Weblinks

 * BlueSpice Website
 * Official feature list
 * BlueSpice Helpdesk
 * Software catalog / extensions list
 * Installation guide
 * Video tutorials