The Enterprise Wiki

My organization is embracing a product called Confluence from Atlassian. Confluence is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge.

Confluence has the following features that go above and beyond open source wiki’s like MediaWiki:

• Enterprise security
• Simple installation and management
• Attractive, user-friendly WYSIWYG interface
• Powerful tools for structuring and searching your wiki
• Professional features such as PDF export and automated refactoring
• An open API for extension and integration
• Plugins that do some very cool things!

If you organization has not embraced wiki’s, I would highly suggest taking a look at this type of technolgy for internal collaboration and documentation.

We hope to use our wiki’s for:

• Internal and external system and database documentation
• Meeting minutes
• A portal to “glue” other information services together
• Central calendaring
• Conference summaries
• and many more features we have not thought of…

I am even using Confluence to organize my personal documentation and files, locally. Atlassian offers a free, personal version of Confluence.

A Confluence Personal License entitles you to:

• Deploy a single instance of Confluence onto a single server;
• Full access for up to two registered users;
• Unlimited anonymous visitors – allow as many people as you want to read and comment on your pages;
• Unlimited pages, spaces and comments;
• Perpetual Confluence use; and
• Software updates for 12 months.

Confluence will run on just about any platform that supports Java. I am currently running Conflucene on my Mac (OSX 10.4.7). The only downfall so far is the memory usage, about 250MB.Give it a try, you will not be disappointed!