[InactionMan]

On a whim, my CFO has asked me to create a corporate wiki. I know nothing of Wikis but I'm the company nerd so it falls on me. I have lots of questions but I'll start with these:

1. What software is popular/reliable/easy to use to impelement a Wiki?
2. Exactly how much is involved in setting up a Wiki before I let the employees have at it?
3. How much or how little coding do I need to do to get it running?

And finally, should this be in third-party products rather than General Discussion?

[Brad]

It depends on what you want to do with your wiki. What's the goal you want to achieve with it?

(Or is this an order from an exec trying to use the latest buzzword tech? )

I've used Trac and MediaWiki, the latter more extensively. They take very little coding to get up and running. You basically just need to set up a new database and database user, install the files in the right place, and run an installation script to set up the database tables.

Moving to Third-Party Products.

[autodata]

pmwiki is fairly popular for intranets because it's highly customizable, allows quite a bit of freedom and is very easy for users to pick up. I having looked at it in a year, but I'd guess there's a wysiwyg editor as a plugin or built in. There is a solid and active community behind it, too.

Here's an example of a intranet done with pmwiki: http://wiki.lib.umn.edu/

At my work we use microsoft's sharepoint which, IMO, is garbage other than the ability to post and edit docs like word docs in place, complete with version control. It only really works in an MS only organization and, in particular, large organizations with a lot of luddites. Of course, everything it does is done in such counterintuitive and nonstandard way (after all, it's MS) that I'd say it's worse for people who don't know anything about apps.

You could try mediawiki. It has a lot of features, but all too often you run into situations where it's clear that it works best for wikipedia and other online reference resources. Customizing it is also not that straightforward and can be a chore compared to other wiki software.

I haven't looked at wiki engines in about a year when I did a big survey of them, but from what I saw then I would use pmwiki. Others might have other preferences.

[InactionMan]

We need the wiki for employees to access information on the various projects that company is currently involved in (something like 120 large scale projects). I'm not sure if the higher ups just want it to be an information repository or as some sort of collaboration tool.

And unless we get new hardware for this, it'll be hosted on whatever spare Windows server we have room on. Everything here is bloody Windows.

[drewprops]

It runs on PHP I assume?
I've been thinking about the same thing for our office.
If our remote IT clowns won't install PHP on our local server then I could install the thing on their website in a protected folder...

[rollercoaster375]

MediaWiki is a very popular one, that I'm familiar with. It's easy to use and set up, and can, quite obviously, handle large amounts of traffic.