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

Wed May 24 19:36:41 PDT 2006

"yes" to answer the original question.  :)

Here's an excellent startpoint.

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

(not my site, btw)

Rob++

vraptor at employees.org wrote:
> 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=

-- 
Internet: windsor at warthog.com                             __o
Life: Rob at Carrollton.Texas.USA.Earth                    _`\<,_
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