Comparison

SharePoint

Pluses

• Highly integrated with Office 2003
• Discussion forums
• Polls - Quick!
• Type specific documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
• Excellent for managing Microsoft documents
• SharePoint Services comes with Windows Server 2003
• Nicely integrated with SQL Server if you need to publish database stored procedure queries.

Minuses

• Ultimately turns into just a file share
• Requires maintenance of the user access
• WebParts have a larger learning curve in comparison
• It is a lot harder to spot relationships between topics/content and make connections
• SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is expensive

Wiki

Pluses

• Simple to use, easy to train (simple = more likely for people to use)
• Simple to cross reference/connect topics
• Shares control of website with the community using it
• Content is text based. This will make it easier to port to another solution.
• Easy to setup and maintain
• Newsletters - WikiNewsletterIndex
• Free
• Why choose FlexWiki

Minuses

• Editing a Wiki document can be cumbersome. It is only text. It isn't Microsoft Word.
• Corporations are accustomed to hierarchy and control
• Not a content management system
• Not good as a discussion forum.

Research Links

• SharePointIntegrationEnhancement - an enhancement discussion topic about integrating FlexWiki and SharePoint
• Channel9 Forum: Wiki vs SharePoint - a discussion thread about Wiki and SharePoint
• 'Wikis' Offer Knowledge-Sharing Online - article
• Description - Wikis are also described as online whiteboards, shared notebooks or group memory. They are forums for sharing knowledge and control — and fostering trust in the process.
• Plus - a Wiki's attraction is in its efficiency
• Minuses
• editing a Wiki document can be cumbersome
• Perhaps the biggest hurdle is cultural. Corporations are accustomed to hierarchy and control.
• Flexwiki my life - blog by Aaron Junod - an experience with FlexWiki
• I first started using it to organize some thoughts on some home projects I was working on, and quickly found it way to easy to create new content.
• I also have some old sharepoint portals that I am going to port the content into my wiki.
• Setting up flexwiki took all of about 5 minutes, and learning the basics took a whole 10 more minutes. Time well spent in my opinion.
• More Random OneNote, SharePoint, Wiki Thoughts - http://www.greghughes.net/rant/CommentView,guid,c6591f8f-d9e8-4478-89ac-5a71334f54bd.aspx - discussion of the ultimate solution, SharePoint and Wiki integration
• I think we can get 90% of the way there (with SharePoint), but that last 10% of missing functionality is a killer.
• http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2004/06/14/155807.aspx - blog about how to share bookmarks
• ...it's a lot harder to spot relationships between them and make connections. This is where a wiki beats SharePoint hands down. Wikis are all about emergent connections and information refactoring...
• http://www.olegdulin.com/index.php/archives/2004/09/17/does-wiki-duplicate-sharepoint/
• Wiki is a collaborative web site, not a content management system. It can be effectively used to get developers to share their notes and other ephemeral content. The simplicity of creating hyperlinks and open free-for-all access without the hassle of a strict workflow increase developer productivity in an agile environment.
• http://home.planet.nl/~fzelders/wikiblog/2004/07/wiki-vs-sharepoint.htm
• My experience with Sharepoint is that it ends up being a fancy shared drive or file dumping ground with not nearly so much extra value as you would get on a Wiki. Most of the implementation I've seen end up having a nicely organized directory structure but are still only glorified file dumping grounds. If the wiki takes off, it turns into a more collaborative space or community white board and I have not seen that emerge on the SharePoint.
• http://www.hatch.org/blog/2003/06/12/onenote_as_a_wiki_frontend.php - ultimate solution, OneNote as a wiki frontend
• http://dev4net.com/blog/archive/2004/08/28/732.aspx - basically, don't use a wiki for a discussion forum
• http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/17137 - discussion of wiki, sharepoint, and version control
• The chosen system appears to be Microsoft Sharepoint. This appears to be an over-designed system built around ASP.NET that stores documents in SQL Server. It's more than just document management - doing lots of portal-like things such as managing discussion groups, photo libraries, and calendaring. From my initial testing of it, it looks "OK", but I'm not bowled over. It's very "busy" in its default layout, and it all looks like a lot of effort to me. For documentation I'm so used to the wiki-way now that anything like this just seems so... complex.
• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SharePoint - SharePoint and Wiki tidbits from all over
• http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/08/11.html#a306 - a blog giving personal experience with collaboration with SharePoint
• At my employer, we used SharePoint Team Services for the last project, and after 2 years, I've decided it was an abject failure, and essentially degraded to a fancy network share.
• http://wiki-thoughts.blogspot.com/2003/11/comparing-wiki-systems-and-sharepoint.html - another good comparison taken from the angle of "feature vectors"
• http://www.michaelakers.net/archives/000070.html - another opinion on the Wiki/SharePoint comparison
• It's true, wikis are very effective, and they may even be a killer app, but there's one major problem with them: they're not Microsoft word. The average user doesn't want to learn a wiki markup language, no matter how simple and easy to use, because it's not Word. Instead, they have to use systems like sharepoint which in my experience ends up being so difficult to use that most people don't use it at all.
• http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/04_23/b3886138.htm?tc - Business Week article about Wikis
• Now, Pisarro has wikis transforming the way people work at the company he founded, software maker Aperture Technologies Inc. Two dozen of the Stamford (Conn.) company's 100 employees use them to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails. Says Pisarro: "Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster."

Blurbs

Taken from http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2003/08/20/54106.aspx

You might ask, 'Wouldn't it be better to just use Microsoft SharePoint Team Services, which is basically a slick, productized version of a wiki?' And I would answer, 'Nope.' I believe that the open, unregulated, anything-goes nature of a wiki is the key to its potential as a knowledge management tool. Why? Because humans learn by organizing and reorganizing information. We take notes during lectures not because we intend to revisit our notes in the future but because reorganizing the information on the fly improves our ability to retain and retrieve that information.

Taken from http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2004/02/19/76672.aspx

I've been preparing to use SharePoint in the run up to our next release of Visual Studio. SharePoint transforms Word into a truly interactive collaborative development environment.

And then there was WikiWiki.hjj

Last week, on a whim, I decided to publish a small, eight-topic tech review to my internal wiki. Developers dig Wiki. It's just close enough to the metal to spark their interest. Here are a few of the reasons that I think Wiki (FlexWiki in particular) is well-positioned to become the tech review tool of choice for technical writers in the 21st century:

1. Change Tracking: version by version, user by user with timestamps, the ability to view and/or rollback to a particular version, and edit highlighting.
2. FlexWiki provides namespace change notifications via an RSS feed (like blogs). At 9:25AM this morning, my newsreader notified me via Outlook style popup that a team member had changed my SourceControlConcepts page at 9:20AM. I promptly incorporated his changes into the master copy of my docs.
3. TOC Ryan LaNeve, a non-Microsoftie, has created a "WikiBehavior" that dynamically displays all of the topics in a FlexWiki namespace, hierarchically inside a wiki topic. Think Table Of Contents.
4. Filtering: another "WikiBehavior" allows a Wiki namespace editor to mark pages as {Property: NeedsReview}.
5. FlexWiki supports Topic Includes... (essentially, a topic collage) and image includes.
6. Comments (well, sorta). The existing TopicTips feature could probably be adapted to this use with a few lines of code.
7. It's FREE.
8. It's EXTENSIBLE. FlexWiki is written in C# and can be easily, easily altered and improved using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET's rapid application development tools.
9. FlexWiki supports Parallel Development: multiple individuals can edit the same topic simultaneously.

Links