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Sorry, but Mediawiki sucks. We had it and used it for a long time. We actually had 2-3 servers running different wikis for the sake of having some kind of access control. We considered moving our (mixed RHEL/Win environment) to Sharepoint, but noticed the aforementioned restrictions.

We've since moved to Confluence. It works well all around, and integrates with the bug tracking product we have from them. You can edit MS documents with a simple Firefox plugin.

I've actually been going through the process of getting code reviews as a standard process on my own team. We've done them now and again in the past - often on other team's code that was being integrated into our platform - and it was typically a pain.

Enter A Good Tool(TM). We've been demoing some code review software lately and after settling on a particular tool that we find to work well with our workflow, the team has unanimously agreed that they find reviews beneficial. We don't have strict policies on how/when reviews are done, so it's encouraging when you see people are creating new reviews for their code of their own volition.

While we haven't found a lot of critical bugs, we have found lots of minor things, problems/shortcomings in unit tests, documentation problems (especially important because we provide libraries to other teams, we're not the sole users of the code), and even pre-existing bugs while doing maintenance. I think the biggest benefits, though, have been getting more eyes on the code to increase familiarity with it so it's easier for other people to do maintenance and bug fixes on when the original author is unable to as well as just generally opening up broader communication about various elements of style, consistency, improving code readability, etc.

The software says we've logged about 16 hours in the past month, across 7 developers. That's a pretty minimal investment. There was mention of good functional testing being all you really need, but if you're working on libraries and such it's easy to have bugs that don't show themselves in all usage scenarios. If well after a release another team manages to find a previously unnoticed bug in a library, the cost for them to track it down to our code, for us to fix it, put through QA, do a new release, pass off to the other team who then has to put their component through QA and deploy.... we've just burnt through a lot of time and money.

Will code reviews lead to perfect code? No. But I would undoubtedly say that there are plenty of benefits that make them well worth it if they're done in an effective fashion.

By the way, the software we settled on is Smart Bear's Code Collaborator, having also tried Crucible and Review Board as well as talking to other divisions about their experiences with code review software. It may not be the right tool for you, but we found it lets us bust through both initial reviews of the code as well as follow-up reviews to ensure any issues are being resolved appropriately. It's not the cheapest, but if it's the difference between a tool people will willingly use or a tool/process that people will bemoan, it's worth it.

Depending on what you need to store this might or might not be of help. Here we I work we use Atlassian's confluence. We've created spaces for each team and then have pages for things like 'manuals', 'system documentation or whatever and attach the files to those. The attachment can then be linked to the page.

or Confluence Hosted: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/hosted/

This is how open source devs respond:

http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-368

Proving once again that while Hibernate is useful, Gavin King is a dickhead.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

For normal for-profit companies it has a cost though.

JIRA is open source and runs on anything:

Atlassian JIRA

http://www.alfresco.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ I'm sure there are more.

We use JIRA at work. It costs money for commercial use, but it is really, really nice. Integration with Subversion is available as a plugin. The main product is http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/.

We use JIRA at work. It costs money for commercial use, but it is really, really nice. Integration with Subversion is available as a plugin. The main product is http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/.

Have never used it but JIRA is an excellent issue tracker, and their integration with FishEye (Code repository browser) looks pretty snazzy. Not sure if it would fit your specific needs.

http://www.atlassian.com/beyond/link_to_source.jsp

My company uses Confluence as an internal wiki for project and technical documentation. It's a piece of cake to create groups and assign fine-tuned privileges with regards to viewing, editing, commenting and destroying. I agree that an organisation with actual classified data is going to make damn sure the system they use can accommodate multiple clearance levels and 'need-to-know' groups.

Getting a first draft, however bad, out for review is critical. There are few people comfortable writing first drafts of procedures. Everyone literate is willing to comment and suggest improvements. I like http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ as a vehicle for organizing input, if you have the money. twiki.org is also used here.

We have SharePoint 2003 - in document terms it's mainly document storage (.doc .xls etc), it's a poor CMS, and has poor doc management built in.
It wins because of the high integration with the office system.
MOSS 2007 should improve on many areas that 2003 was lacking - including some Wiki abilities - but I have no exp. with that.
If you're looking for similar office integration with OpenOffice take a look at: http://www.o3spaces.com/ - I have not tried this in production - but looks promising.

We also have dokuWiki as a separate service:
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki

Pluses: fast, easy to use and user friendly, permission management through the web(!!), integration to Windows Active directory (with multiple sub domains)
Minuses: ? flat file storage?. This is really a point of view thing. My first aim was DB storage only - but dokuwiki surprised on other ends so we took it. I don't see real performance issues because of file storage, but you lack some features you'd get if you were running a DB...

If you're looking into commercial Wiki - I was also impressed by Confluence - which would probably be my choice if I had to spend money on a Wiki today.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

Hope this helps...
Dan

I don't have a lot of Java experience, but In My Experience Java

and there you have it.

take it from someone with years of commercial experience using a broad variety of web frameworks.

( perhaps its time you grabbed tomcat and a few sample servlet/jsp based web apps and took it for a spin. try confluence ( http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence ) with the free/personal license. )

php has its place, but that place is definately not for big, feature rich, scalable and fast web applications. ( and we'll cut php some slack and just not mention security at all ). probably the biggest flaw in the php model is the need to load the entire application up for each request. in the java model, the application is loaded and establishes listeners which handle requests immediately.

banks make choices based on actual best practices, then select the most appropriate platform for development and deployment, which will invariably be a choice of java or .NET ( using the java clone c# ), and will usually be influenced by what other infrastructure is already in place.

i run confluence at home on a p3 733 machine with 512 megs of ram, which also does several other java web apps, postgres, mysql, sendmail, dovecot, spamassassin, ldap, smb/nfs, and of course apache with a few php apps for good measure. confluence returns responses every bit as fast as squirrelmail and orders of magnitude faster than that pig slop sugar CRM.

if you ever needed a case study in what not to implement in php, let me tell you sugarCRM is it.

and of course, mod_cache is very effective for static content coming out of a java web app behind mod_jk ( or mod_proxy_ajp ), and theres a ton of open source servlet filters you can wire in to your web.xml to squeeze even more out of it. ( all this without even starting to talk about ehcache or oscache for query and db object caching within the application )

come back when you try the above, and try tell us with a straight face that php is the better choice for just about anything past 'my first dynamic website'.

opening up with 'i have no java experience, so let me tell you about my java experience' is really just wasting bandwidth.

regards.

JIRA is nice, but I'm not sure it satisfies the poster's open source requirements. AFAIK, the source code is only available to 'commercial users' http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v2.6.1 /building.html which I assume requires a paid-for commercial licence http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing.jsp . I guess it depends on one's definition of 'open source' as to whether this is sufficiently open.

JIRA is nice, but I'm not sure it satisfies the poster's open source requirements. AFAIK, the source code is only available to 'commercial users' http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v2.6.1 /building.html which I assume requires a paid-for commercial licence http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing.jsp . I guess it depends on one's definition of 'open source' as to whether this is sufficiently open.

I've noticed that email works well in some cases. When you need to contact someone about something which is not that important, email is excellent. Also if you want to discuss something important, email is a good media because you can craft your response as long as it takes. The conversation is stored so there's no need to keep separate notes.

Then are those cases when email doesn't work at all, most related to work in some way or the other.

A lot of detail is lost in email. Writing things down is a much slower process and more error prone then describing them in person. There's also the danger of the recipient misunderstanding the message, even to the point where a wrong wording might be understood as an personal insult or challenge.

Email is flooding the inbox. About 20% of the email I get is something that conserns me. Yet I need to constantly filter all the emails in case I miss something important. I'd prefer to read the general announcements from the intranet. No, I'm not interested in mainframe upgrade problems.

Emails get forgotten. "Oh I forgot to send you that email two weeks ago"

Discussions about complex and large issues usually get derailed if there are too many people chipping in. Details are lost in the flood of the messages as people fork their own discussions. ... and so on.

Finding out good ways to reduce the amount of emails isn't easy. It seems that the best principle is to use the right tool for the job.

Bug and issue tracking, tasks and project management work much better when a proper project management software is used. Concentrating on the right tasks is much easier, if you just need to check from the application what you're supposed to be doing. Everything gets assigned to a someone so it's always obvious who should be working on what. This is an interesting piece about how Linden Labs uses a task management software to control their every day tasks -> http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/casestudies /linden.jsp "We use JIRA for all task-in-progress tracking in the company - everything from ordering food in the kitchen to releasing a new feature to fixing a bug."

Face to face discussions, meetings (in moderate amount) and pair programming increase the flow of information. Forums work nicely for discussions in a larger group. Wikis are good for sharing information. Somehow I just wish they'd all come as a nicely integrated package which allows the information flow as naturally as possible. (and no, Lotus Notes is not integrated, nice or natural)

Integrating with Subversion is about a 5 minute process:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /svn_integration.html

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JI RA+Subversion+plugin

I'm not sure which wiki you're referring to by 'the wiki', but it integrates quite nicely with Confluence:

http://www.atlassian.com/confluence/

It also has a generic trackback mechanism to integrate with other wiki's:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /trackback.html

Integrating with Subversion is about a 5 minute process:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /svn_integration.html

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JI RA+Subversion+plugin

I'm not sure which wiki you're referring to by 'the wiki', but it integrates quite nicely with Confluence:

http://www.atlassian.com/confluence/

It also has a generic trackback mechanism to integrate with other wiki's:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /trackback.html

Integrating with Subversion is about a 5 minute process:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /svn_integration.html

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JI RA+Subversion+plugin

I'm not sure which wiki you're referring to by 'the wiki', but it integrates quite nicely with Confluence:

http://www.atlassian.com/confluence/

It also has a generic trackback mechanism to integrate with other wiki's:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /trackback.html

Integrating with Subversion is about a 5 minute process:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /svn_integration.html

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JI RA+Subversion+plugin

I'm not sure which wiki you're referring to by 'the wiki', but it integrates quite nicely with Confluence:

http://www.atlassian.com/confluence/

It also has a generic trackback mechanism to integrate with other wiki's:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest /trackback.html

We use Jira, it's equally as crappy as any other ticket tracking system out there.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

BBH

I've found that Mylar makes me extremely productive. I've tried task lists and post-it notes before, both real and virtual. With Mylar embedded in Eclipse, I have my tasks in the same application as my code, so they don't get lost or require a context switch to view. I'm using it in conjunction with Jira (it works with Bugzilla and Trac just as well or better), and I keep my bigger tasks organized by future release in Jira. I can see them in Mylar if I want to, but they're usually folded up and out of the way, except for the release I'm currently working on.

When I start to work on a large Jira feature, I create a bunch of small local tasks in Mylar that will only take an hour or two to complete, and I schedule them. It only takes a couple of seconds. If I get into the middle of a task or refactoring, and I find something else that needs to be done, I just create another local task if it's small or Jira task if it's big.

This has nearly eliminated all my procrastinating. A lot of why I procrastinated is because my releases are large, and I could never create enough post-it notes or tasks in any other system to make the releases manageable. Breaking the tasks down also makes them more fun because they turn into small annoyances that I want to get rid of. I come back from lunch thinking that I can get two or three done before I go home instead of wondering where I left off on a three month release.

There are a couple great side effects of this system. It's really easy to create release notes from the Jira tasks, and it's easy to create status reports from the local tasks in Mylar. I never forget anything. I also find it easier to go home at the end of the day, since I can create a task that will let me know right where I'm leaving off, and I make sure to activate the task, clear out all the other editors, and leave the task open. I write down everything I'm thinking at the end of the day, and I'm less likely to lie awake at night thinking about what I still have to do.

Another post mentions it, but Confluence may be a good fit. It is a Wiki, but geared towards the needs of an enterprise. Compared to other wikis, Confluence has better permission control and has better facilities for organizing articles. We have deployed several Conflence instances for clients, and all are happy.

The key points for us:

• Supports page level access controls
• Integrates with external authentication system (LDAP/Active Directory)
• Runs on a Java Application Server

We use Confluence, a wiki from Atlassian. It also integrates well with Jira, their bug tracking program we also use. Both products are popular with some open source projects, the names of which elude me at the time.

We use Confluence, a wiki from Atlassian. It also integrates well with Jira, their bug tracking program we also use. Both products are popular with some open source projects, the names of which elude me at the time.

I hate to post as an Anonymous Coward, but my employer has cautioned us against comments that could be viewed as criticism or endorsements of products.

I have no idea why Fog Bugs still survives in the market. One of the managers where I work liked Fog Bugs and we purchased a copy. No one used it. We used Bugzilla and then migrated to Jira. Joel constantly demonstrates the infamous arrogance of someone who worked (or works) at Microsoft. As the parent post notes, there is nothing behind Joel's arrogance but Joel's loud mouth and his character of being a legend in his own mind.

I use JIRA for my issue tracking now, and I couldn't be happier. Looking at Google's current offering, I probably won't be switching anytime soon.

Wow, you didn't even try looking at other commercial wikis?
Try http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/defau lt.jsp. It looks like a very good wiki which can handle all of the binary MS file decoding+displaying.

Cheers,
Ben

PS. I haven't tried it myself. Have just read the website and other people's reviews.

• WYSIWYG editor built in with an option to do wiki-markup if you want.
• Full versioning of the docs and attachments
• Full searchable indexing of both docs and attachments (even word, powerpoint, excel, and pdfs)
• Customizable navigation and templating
• Easily customizable permissions
• It works great with open-source databases (postgres in our case) and pay ones and its searching is very powerful
• You can be set-up and running in about 30 minutes

I would strongly recommend going with a Wiki with access control. This will allow your team to collaborate on various documents. I highly recommend Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ from Atlassian Software.

Everything your analysts like about the combo of Word and Sharepoint will be provided in an easy to use package, plus everything that the "geeks" want, need, and love will also be provided.

Yours,

Jordan

It's not open source, but my group has been using Confluence for developer documentation and I love it. It has a very polished user interface, is easy to configure, and uses web standards so you don't have to be running all MS crap to get anything done. We also use JIRA for bug-tracking and the way they tie together is very cool.

As far as open source alternatives, you can check out any of the hundreds of wikis out there. I think XWiki has a lot to offer.

Unfortunately, we've been told by management that we have to use Sharepoint. I've only used the services bundled with Windows 2003, so maybe it gets better, but using it from a Linux desktop with Firefox makes me want to claw my eyes out. It looks like something cobbled together over the weekend by a refugee from 1995.

It's a great article because it puts out some more reasons why wikis are the way of the future and docs and shared drives aren't. Before I was acting of intution and now at least it's possible to point to someone else who agrees.

Did you even look at other Wikis before going with MediaWiki?

No, actually I didn't. All of the features which I thought were important then were built into MediaWiki.
And the fact it is relatively easy to install and support was appealling when I couldm't devote alot of time to understanding the whole The Wiki Way.
I just wanted something that worked fast and well.

If I redid it, I'd probably push my company to use confluence. it's more along the lines of a professional collaberation tool without the overhead and expense. I'd also look at Trac if I had any say over the SCM or bugtracking systems my company uses.

Cheers,
Ben

Bolt on a word processor to a wiki you say?

It's already been done: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/defau lt.jsp

It's not free for corporate use... but it's good. Really really damn good.

Umm, they specifically say it's not open source!

The only difference between open source and free software is the marketing philosophy, anyway. If something isn't free software, it's by definition not open source, either.

I don't know if I would be willing to trust Atlassian. On their page for the top ten features of JIRA here

They have this as the first reason:
JIRA has features that you just will not find in any other issue tracker:

* Easily build and save highly-configurable filters (dynamic queries) across all issues in the system.
Umm... SugarCRM, Bugzilla, SalesForce, and Remedy have this (to varying degrees)

* Share filters with other users, or subscribe to them and get the results emailed to you periodically.
In Bugzilla(email the search link to share, RSS feeds)
In SugarCRM(not sure how to share; I suppose you could email search links, RSS feeds as well)
The other 2 I listed before, I don't know, haven't used too much.

* Dynamic issue links allow you to link issues across projects, for example duplicates or subissues.
SugarCRM, Bugzilla, SalesForce, and Remedy have this (linking bugs back and forth should be a standard feature in a bug tracker)

* The Dashboard gives each user a single place to view all information relevant to them at a glance.
Bugzilla - My Bugs
Remedy - My Issues (if I remember correctly)
SugarCRM - Home
SalesForce - Home (yeah it is a stretch on these last 2, you are managing way too much information to fit it all on one screen usually with these apps)

* Custom fields,
Bugzilla - (not exactly yet [there are patches that do this now tho], see this buglist, and especially bug 91037
SugarCRM - yep
Remedy - yep (as I understand it, everything is a custom field in Remedy)
SalesForce - I believe so

Excel integration,
Bugzilla, SugarCRM, Remedy, SalesForce - yep

project roadmaps,
Bugzilla - define roadmap exactly, if you are looking for milestones and dependencies, then yes, if you are looking for marketing hype then possibly not
SugarCRM, Remedy, SalesForce - yep

changelogs,
Bugzilla - sorta, if you are using it correctly
SugarCRM, Remedy, SalesForce - I don't know

REST API
What is this?
Bugzilla - not a "REST" API... (lots of perl modules, for users wanting server API for writing plugins, bug 224577 is the start of a future SOAP API that would let bugzilla become a web service :))
SugarCRM, SalesForce - Both have their own API's for writing plugins
Remedy - Is there any need for one? The problem with Remedy is that it often does too much. This is why they send a person to your installation site to discuss with you exactly what you need, and then they customize it for you.

and much, much more...
This doesn't even need commenting.

I am just using these 4 (very different) products to demonstrate because I have used each of them. I am sure there are others that maintain each of those features.

Preface: Yes, I know they're not open source. Guess what? I don't care! It's great software!

I highly reccomend Confluence as a Wiki for software development. Aside from being just about the perfect Wiki for any purpose, it's got great syntax highlighting and plugins for development. Not sure if it would let you edit directly from the web, but seriously, reconsider that requirement. I doubt anyone would actually use that anyway. It does have JUnit test reports built in too, so it's even better if you're using Java. It also integrates tightly with their bugtracking software JIRA, which is also amazing if you don't have a good bugtracker yet. But even if you're just using confluence for docs and specs, it's definitely the best Wiki out there for that.

Other than that, there's always everything else ^^^ that has already been said... Good luck!

Confluence.

You can't go wrong with atlassian's confluence wiki and jira bugtracker. They at least can be integrated, I don't know if there is native support for source code etc. Check it out, their support is excellent, so they'll be able to answer your questions.

http://www.atlassian.com/ (Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer)

"Took you long enough. Anyway, the one thing lacking from Wikis in that area is group-page access control. TWiki is the only Wiki which claims to sort of have it, but also warns vigorously that it doesn't work securely."

Actually, the Confluence wiki says it has page level access control tied to groups and individuals.

We are currently evaluating it for use for our Intranet system. Confluence is not open source, but features like these might make it worth paying for.

I am curious if anyone has any experience with the Confluence wiki?

"Took you long enough. Anyway, the one thing lacking from Wikis in that area is group-page access control. TWiki is the only Wiki which claims to sort of have it, but also warns vigorously that it doesn't work securely."

Actually, the Confluence wiki says it has page level access control tied to groups and individuals.

We are currently evaluating it for use for our Intranet system. Confluence is not open source, but features like these might make it worth paying for.

I am curious if anyone has any experience with the Confluence wiki?

"Took you long enough. Anyway, the one thing lacking from Wikis in that area is group-page access control. TWiki is the only Wiki which claims to sort of have it, but also warns vigorously that it doesn't work securely."

Actually, the Confluence wiki says it has page level access control tied to groups and individuals.

We are currently evaluating it for use for our Intranet system. Confluence is not open source, but features like these might make it worth paying for.

I am curious if anyone has any experience with the Confluence wiki?

My favorite: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
Confluence is just software ($4K + $2k/year); no hardware or hosting.

From the founders of Excite: http://www.jotspot.com/
Jotspot sells hosting w/ SSL ($9-$250/month) or remotely maintained appliances ($10K-$15K/year); no software.

BusinessWeek's choice: http://www.socialtext.com/
Socialtext sells software and hardware but no hosting (Can't remember the price range right now).

You might also want to look into search appliances such as Google's enterprise stuff:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/

• WordToWiki
• Word to Confluence

I mentioned HTML Tidy already, but you could also automate MS word and crawl through the Word Object model and reproduce the page in HTML. One advantage of this method is you can identiry all the parts of the document including footnotes and formulas. Here is some code to start with. The tricky part is to realize you have to crawl through each paragraph/range at the word level and check styles. Do it at the character level and the thing is a dog. Another tricky part is crawling through the document in the correct order. The link isn't my code but was the closest I could find on the web before I sat down and figured it out myself.

You look like the perfect customer for Atlassian JIRA http://www.atlassian.com/
It's cheap and it perfectly fills your requirements list.
Q.

Another good one, which we use for our 8 man dev team with numerous branching projects, is Altassian's JIRA. Highly recommended and reasonably priced as well.