But, did you know you can create your own wiki for personal or business use? As one might imagine, Foxtrot has a lot of customer-specific data to store and retrieve. So, we have a wiki appliance by MindTouch (actually we used to build their appliances when they still sold hardware). It's served on the web, but secured only for our internal users. All we need is a web connection, and we have any customer's vital info at our fingertips. Settings, special customer-specific processes, user information, and more are all stored on our wiki.
Custom wikis can either be private to select users like Foxtrot's, or public and open for all to contribute. Here are a few good free wiki sites:
- wikia
- wik.is (MindTouch's free hosted offering)
- pbwiki (one of the originals)
- viawiki (a joint effort of MindTouch and MN-based ISP Visi)
- opengarden (where you can download MindTouch's wiki software and host/run your own wiki)
Wikis are great for secure, online group collaboration, as anyone with access can post anything - start a new page, add ideas to existing content, etc.
Members can subscribe to pages, so they see any edits or additions to that topic.
The interface is almost entirely wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - type away, and save when you're done), so no special programming skills are required.
Files and documents can be uploaded, downloaded and modified. Most wikis even provide an archive feature so you can view previous version of each document and roll back to a previous version if the latest one is not right.
Some of the newer wikis can even link and/or embed videos, maps, etc. Combine data from two or more disperate sources to create interesting mashups.
If you have a situation where you want to put information on the web for your internal reference, or for collaboration, wiki technology is something to think seriously about.
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