8 August 2007

Local wiki based upon .NET: ScrewTurn

In the company I'm working for the time being wasn't any allusion to the documentation center. There weren't any guidelines, sole coding conventions, document templates etc. All the documents circulation was organized on e-mailing. Thus, I took upon myself to bring an order to the chaos. Luckily, our boss is farsighted enough to be interested in the feature like that.

So, I found the wiki that looked good and is implemented on the ASP.NET platform. Here you may find its home page. We have used it for a while and here are its advantages:

  • It's open and built on the .NET platform, thus we can change its behavior ever we want and to keep other .NET applications on the same server (IIS), on the same port.
  • It supports database storing in the different locations (through pluggable providers): file system, Microsoft SQL Server 2000/5, MySQL 5.
  • It's quite simple-looking.
  • It's quite simple-installing.
  • It has advanced discussions support.
  • Advanced backuping support.
  • It uses AJAX
But we found a few problems:
  • There is too little of user experience with this wiki.
  • As it's built on the .NET, we have less flexibility for hosting - it should be Windows-based and there is no room for other ones.
  • It has the markup language that is quite different from the wikipedia's for example, and it has much less features and possibilities than the mentioned one.
  • It's being developed by the small dev-group unlike the wikipedia. Thus, we have no confidence that the wiki will be alive and in development even in the nearest future.
That's why we at last decided to change to the MediaWiki. I'll try to describe it later.

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