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http://jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiWhiteboardPlugin lets you draw and save sketches in your wiki, I havent used it but I've often thought about it.

Our management wanted an "intranet" a few years back but had zero budget. My answer was JSPWiki on a Linux box.

The wiki has succeeded in a couple of notable areas. The photo directory page is critical for learning new faces on a rapidly growing staff. Another page has completely replaced sticky-notes that were formerly used to coordinate certain tasks among staff and interns. The IT department has a lot of miscellaneous documentation pages. A few other pages serve the function of an electronic bulletin board for staff scattered across two buildings.

Management was very concerned at first that staff would abuse the wiki, either by wasting time posting trivia or by outright vandalism. Neither fear has materialized.

The biggest failure of the wiki is the number of abandoned pages. They don't do any harm, but about a third of pages are derelict, with old information that the author obviously lost interest in maintaining. Having a wiki editor might solve that problem, but in practice it doesn't rise to the level.

Since you plan to decouple your various processes, why not use a single "watchdog" process to oversee the others and restart if necessary? This is a commonly used technique in high availability environments. You can guarantee the watchdog is running by putting it in a cron job, whereby it continues running if it can't see itself in the process list.

Hope this helps!

There are wiki's that deal with this. We use JSPWiki on our intranet; it is a std. servlet webapp. The next version should support authorization, but even without it: I put the webapp behind a mandatory browser client certificate authentication (you can only access it through https, and everyone on the intranet has a certificate). Then with a one-line modification the Edit.jsp is only accessible to people that have a certain role (i.e. a small group of people responsible for the content), but everyone can read.

Versions are tracked in RCS, so any mistakes can be reversed. Also the client IP addresses are logged, and internally it is known who has which IP address. So any of your questions can be answered satisfactorily.

Also it has templates to apply some corporate style. Your mission critical internal product/project, in a large bank, uses it for all important documentation.

There are wiki's that deal with this. We use JSPWiki on our intranet; it is a std. servlet webapp. The next version should support authorization, but even without it: I put the webapp behind a mandatory browser client certificate authentication (you can only access it through https, and everyone on the intranet has a certificate). Then with a one-line modification the Edit.jsp is only accessible to people that have a certain role (i.e. a small group of people responsible for the content), but everyone can read.

Versions are tracked in RCS, so any mistakes can be reversed. Also the client IP addresses are logged, and internally it is known who has which IP address. So any of your questions can be answered satisfactorily.

Also it has templates to apply some corporate style. Your mission critical internal product/project, in a large bank, uses it for all important documentation.

In contrast, our internal Wiki (a JSPWiki instance) grows by leaps and bounds, currently at the rate of 400 new pages a month, and typically 50+ edits a day. There was never any official pronouncement to make it so; I actually started it here just for myself.

I think it took off because it was adopted by some high-profile and prolific people, and thus "It's in the Wiki" and "put it in the Wiki" became common phrases. I think that these combined to make it the "official" place to keep vital information. Quite a few developers have personal blogs and todo lists on the Wiki. The ease of corrections and low barrier to entry have really helped people get into it, though adoption is certainly far from universal. But I've seen meetings where the principal focus seems to be editing a Wiki page until it's correct, which is a great way to arrive at consensus and publish the consensus at the same time.

mahlen

Dang it. You beat me to it. I need to spend less time working and more time on Slashdot. I could have had all that Karma!

I was going to post this blog entry by the author of JSPWiki software.

Try JSPWiki. That's what I use. It took me a grand total of 5 minutes to set up.