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    • Advice on TikiWiki

    Posted by cakeholes

    Hi all,

    This is not a help question per se, but I'm looking for some general advice on the use of TikiWiki. For the last year and a half, my company has been using Convea as a collaboration portal between employees and our clients. We've had pretty good success with it and we were able to configure custom modules to accomodate our needs. We added openwiki as a module, our Intranet for internal IPs only, and incorporated our Web Mail in as well.

    That being said, Convea is no longer open source 🙁 and the version we are running is getting long in the tooth. Add to that the fact that we want better security within our wiki pages (can't have clients seeing other clients info), and the fact that in order to achieve and maintain critical mass with a tool like a portal/wiki/cms/groupware site, you need to keep it fresh and interesting....oh and dead simple to use 😀. We have to keep up our usage and expand it in order to keep the management interested in the time and capital investment of maintaining a tool like this.

    So now I am on the hunt for something that will fill the holes that were missing in Convea and wow the users with features that aren't just cool and cutting edge but actually useful for them in getting their jobs done faster, more effectively and reliably.

    Is there anyone out there that can offer some insight and advice on TikiWiki? Preferably someone who has experience with it in a consultant/client relationship. We currently have about 75 employees, some in site offices, lots of interest in working from home, and about 150 users in total of our Convea portal. Can anyone tell me if TikiWiki is suitable for such a purpose? It certainly looks to be very feature rich and has good support and development.

    Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

    Kevin

    Reads: 610
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee

    I was holding back to see if you'd get a reply from someone with more experience in this particular application area. You might also try the Tiki IRC channel, as maybe somebody there can respond. But I'll chip in on my own, for what it's worth. 😉

    It seems to me that Tiki could handle that application. Regarding client information, previously that was a problematic area since lists (search results, page lists, etc.) didn't honor permissions, so any user group could see at least a glimpse of other groups' information. This problem seems to be getting solved, though, as I notice in 1.9rc3 the list of galleries, for example, doesn't show galleries that the user doesn't have permission to view. I haven't checked if this is the case for all listings, though, but I believe Damian said it was in 1.9.

    Certainly the collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing needs can be handled by Tiki. I don't know what Convea offers in terms of these capabilities, but I would think Tiki could match it.

    In terms of negatives, some people have pointed out a namespace problem in that user groups with no knowledge of each other's content might have page-name conflicts, if I understand things right. I don't think there's a method to identify objects automatically based on author group, etc., in order to avoid such a conflict. As far as I know, if this were a potential problem at a site, a workaround would have to be to have an agreed-on system of page names, etc. maybe prefixed according to author group. But here again, I don't have firsthand experience and hope someone who does can give some insight.

    As a constantly-developed project, Tiki can be a bit rough around the edges at times, I think it's fair to say. Sometimes, for example, there are admin controls that aren't wired up yet, or functional or cosmetic glitches of one kind or another. How much of an issue this type of thing is will depend on your environment, needs, users and so on, and how well the Tiki admin can know what's working fully and what isn't and perhaps not activate a feature that isn't up to par, or bring in a "Tiki expert" to smooth things out.

    Any other people with experience with Tiki along these lines who can give some advice?

    -- Gary