Wikis are great tools for documentation projects. Especially if the people creating the documents are dispersed geographically.
However, I am embarking on a project to write a quality manual for the CIX data centre (Cork’s first fully redundant data centre). Part of the process in creating a quality manual is that the various sections within it need to be reviewed and approved before they can be released.
Does anyone know of a wiki with that functionality built-in?
Docuwiki? That’s the closest I can think of.
I’d try a collaborating with Google Docs for something like that. It’s got pretty good revision history these days.
Excuse my ignorance, but just what is a Wikis?
Thanks Keith – I’ll look into that.
Robin – I use Google Docs frequently for collaborating but is there an approvals process in it?
Jim – a wiki is online software which allows anyone to edit a document they are viewing – all through a browser. Wikipedia is the best known example and it defines a wiki here.
I would suggest defining a document-approval workflow based on tags on the pages, or page categories. You don’t need to require the wiki software support it, when you can define social rules instead.
Ensure you mail page changes to a mailing list, so that you can review these approvals and revert any mistakes…
Check out drupal, its one of the best opensource CMS systems out there. You have to host it and it requires PHP + MySQL.
There’s a core system and more plugins than you can shake a stick at.
You can check it out in operation, along with a bunch of other open source CMS solutions.
John
Take a look at Blogtronix. They have ways of including rudimentary workflows for blog entries which could work, depending on who you are as a user. Five levels of ‘membership’ so you can really give the approvals process a good twist. What’s more, George is very helpful when it comes to mods.
You could use RSS so that different approvers can see updates through their feeds.
Have you thought about something like JotSpot? That has (had) a project management wiki so might be closer to what you’re thinking of in terms of document version control? But then you could use Blogtronix to provide a feedback to anyone who is commenting or editing. The net result is the same. It’s all in the configuration.
On balance, I’d take a good look at Blogtronix. They have some of the best of Joomla and Drupal munged together to deliver a pretty good ‘out the box’ experience.
Or…how about iUpload?. They can pull in feeds from all over the place, you just tell it what you want. It can wikify posts – that might be an answer. They too have sophisticated user control.