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Windows, Wikis and Blogs

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Just starting a new project at our place.
Three to four teams involved on an off.
Long project easily broken down in to several deliveries, some only internal.
Some of the team, hopefully including me will be remote workers.

To help facilitate things we decided to look at setting up a wiki and blog.

Basically we are a windows house and that isn't going to change as our customers are.

Linux isn't totally ruled out as a solution, but it's not the preferred one.

So we found a couple of wiki solutions such as sushiwiki, that are wholly MS, nothing on the blog side though.

Course search for wiki or blog on google and you get a lot or returns. :D

So anyone know some all MS solutions to both.
I had a look at getting wordpress to work with IIS, and it did not look worth the effort.

Setting up Wordpress on a WAMP server, was a breeze, so allied with something like MediaWiki, I can have an easily implemented solution on one box.

Am I wasting my time looking for an all MS solution, or did it have a funny name and I just missed it on google. :D

12 replies

by apotheon

It looks like, at the moment, the best weblog software options are WordPress and Typo. The former is PHP, the latter Ruby on Rails. Both should run just fine via Apache on MS Windows, assuming support for the language/framework used to build them. I'm not really sure about how well either is supported on IIS -- that's something you'll have to figure out for yourself. Rails, however, comes with its own dedicated webserver called WEBrick, if you want to use that, and it's not a bad choice for Rails applications.

IIS-targeted weblog software tends to be of the obtuse sort, a desktop application that generates static pages that can be uploaded to the server without much in the way of useful features. There are exceptions to this -- they're basically all ASP.NET and expensive, mostly with licenses that target single-user weblogs. Many of the Apache-targeted weblog software options can also be run on IIS, though it often takes a bit of hoop-jumping to get them running on IIS.

In general, the good wiki software all runs on Apache, with IIS support as an afterthought if IIS is supported at all. The best for quick setup and deployment, in my experience, are MediaWiki (the software used by Wikipedia) and TikiWiki (kinda like a lightweight reimplementation of most of MediaWiki). The former is more feature-rich and generally robust. The latter is more portable and easier to set up. Both are excellent, in my experience, despite the fact they're both written in PHP.

There are Ruby-based wikis called Soks and Instiki. I know nothing about them, though they tend to be well-regarded. You may want to evaluate them for yourself. They both work excellently well with WEBrick. I'm sure they work well with Apache as well. IIS -- probably not so much.

Unless you want to settle for C-list software, or write it all yourself, you should probably set up Apache on your MS Windows server (or run it on a Linux/*BSD box). The fact you have MS Windows clients shouldn't require you to use an MS Windows server for their web browsing pleasure. The whole point of the Web is portable, platform nonspecific, easy, universal access for clients. Corporate logo compatibility will have no effect on the technical performance of your solutions.

by kyro

The new version of the Microsoft SharePoint Server has a Wiki and Blog template. See -- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101758881033.aspx

by cactus pete

SharePoint Services are free with 2003 but SharePoint Portal server gets pricey fast.

Search the TR site for loads of info on this.

by onbliss

...that has links to other TR material on this subject: https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=213533&messageID=2185819

:-)

by onbliss

If you ever want to look at just blogs, then CS might be one option.

But CS-Wiki is available as an add-on. Check out http://communityserver.org/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=wiki&o=Relevance

by dawgit

Why not dot-net Nuke? it is also open, free-ware. and a large community to turn to for help. Runs great with the .net platform (one of the few things M$ as done right. IMHO) It would kind of fit your situation perfectly. -d

by dawgit

But it is in use, quite a bit. I guess it would make sense if you were 'stuck' in a M$ enviroment. To me, it seems an aufull lot of steps to get from point A to the W3. (I'm looking to start something of the like, but, I don't see .netNuke in the picture for what I want to do.)

by tony hopkinson

PHPNuke, I'll give that one a pass, f'ing horrible that is.

I did see a few projects sort of started in SourceForge.net, but I want to use it soon. Can't see management being happy with a month long delay to write some software so I can write some software.

They are picky about that sort of thing. :p

by tony hopkinson

I shall follow up the MS suggestions, to be thorough.

Setting up WordPress and MediaWiki was so easy, and seeing as the only 'foreigner' in the mix is Apache. I'm probably going to go with that unless something magical turns up.

I want to be on blogging and documenting what's coming out of the Proof Of Concepts, and the whiteboard sessions.

I'll have a look at some bug fixes to MediaWiki on my own time. :D

Cheers All

by jamesrl

The Sharepoint services are fine.

There is no "blog" feature per se, but there are threaded discussions, and you could certainly use it that way. It also offers user polls, versioning controls including check in check out etc.

We use it exactly the way you would (for projects) but we don't expose it to the outside.

There are some pretty good project group templates already built. You can link it to MS Project server, but we haven't gone that far.

Its pretty low overhead.

James

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