Is "wiki" the current state-of-the-art for a "virtual whiteboard?"

Tue May 23 13:42:33 PDT 2006

On Tue, 23 May 2006, Jim Hickstein wrote:

> David Wolfskill wrote:
>> I've been asked to set up a very low-volume, restricted-access
>> application that the requestors liken to a "virtual whiteboard."
>
> I still like TWiki for this; I just upgraded to 4.0 (which purports to have 
> WYSIWYG editing, but I haven't see it yet).  It can be set up to enforce 
> identifying users before they can edit things, and it has RCS behind it, so 
> it's suitable for places where the Wiki orthodoxy (let anyone do anything, and 
> someone will correct it) makes people uncomfortable.
>
> Strangely, the biggest problem it solves is the line-ending dilemma.  A text 
> file will only work if (a) everyone is handy with a text editor (which many 
> are not), and (b) they agree to pick one form of line ending -- CR or CRLF or 
> LF -- and stick with it.  Going over the network with HTTP at once enforces 
> this and makes the issue go away.  It's amazing how big this problem really 
> is, and how neatly this solves it.
>
> I hear some grumbling that editing the pre-HTML markup language is still "too 
> hard", but WYSIWYG TWiki is supposed to fix that.  I'd take a look.

I've tested Twiki and some of the others that do not require a db or
php.  Twiki is probably the best "all rounder" that doesn't require
(but allows you to use, if you like) those extra components.  I liked
DokuWiki out of the others that I tested, as it was very easy to set
up and seemed lightweight and nice looking out of the gate; others in
my team preferred MoinMoin.  One of the Perl-based ones (I don't
remember which) was a real pain to install on Solaris. We ended up
installing Twiki, but it never really got off the ground because the
opportunity for an open documenting culture in our team had already
been hacked off at the knees by management and clients insisting on
having everything in Word docs in Exchange public folders. :-(

At current $ork, we are using Confluence, which does have real WSYWIG
editting.  It seems to be well-accepted among the non-techies in my
team.  I prefer the "wiki" style markup because it's faster for me.
We are also using Jira for issue tracking.  They seem to be pretty
robust, and the support team is responsive.  We saw a problem with out
of memory issues, and not only did they update the documentation to
indicate that this was a separate memory parameter, they fixed the bug
in the next point release.

They are commercial products, but not very expensive.  Certainly they
are overkill for David's needs, though.

=Nadine=