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The most important thing about any documentation solution is that people use it, otherwise it is useless. To minimize the costs of using it, I suggest you find a solution that is similar to something people at your organization are used to using.

I had the same problem land on my desk a month ago. All of our policies and procedures were stored in a big notebook that was horribly out of date and that no one read. Since we use Trac for our dev department, people were used to the wiki formatting on it. I installed MoinMoin as a corporate wiki, which uses the same format.

MoinMoin is great because it uses basic authentication from apache, so you can authenticate it against whatever you have (like Active Directory), and people don't need another set of passowrds. It is simple to use and also easy to backup. Also, if you have a corporate intranet already, it is not difficult to integrate.

The wiki is great because anyone can modify it without alot of fanfare. However, if you choose a solution that is yet another thing to learn how to use, no one will take the time to use it. Again, the most important thing in my opinion is to lower the cost to the end user so that it is easier to post the information on the wiki than answer the same question again and again.

Tomboy? MoinMoin?

Our group evaluated a handful of workgroup tools: issue tracking, revision control, documentation. Trac was in the list, but it fell short on a number of points after we tried it for a simple project. We wanted SVN integration and liked Mantis, so we hooked in scmbug. It took a little tweaking to setup the 'products' in scmbug to meet our Mantis usage pattern, but it does the trick. Throw on your favorite wiki (mediawiki, twiki, moinmoin, etc.), and you are covered.

It sounds like I could get Sharepoint by installing MoinMoin, Word Press, and integrating the two with something like OpenID for single sign-on.

How is this some spectacular whizzy thing that nobody else is doing? Could you please enlighten us all as to what makes it so fantastically juicy to the CIO set?

Well, I faced a similar need some time ago. I ended up using MoinMoin. I know, it's not a blogging software, it's a wiki, but in my case it does the job. There might be some other choices available at the wiki-front, but MoinMoin has syntax-colorisation for some programming languages built-in (Python, C, SH scripts if I remember correctly, I had a need for Python only).

Taking all your crap wherever I go, how tired would I be. Forgetting or having no time...

I use gmail for mail, moin moin (not exactly web 2.0 and not hosted by someone else, but who cares) for all our documentation, writely for documents I share with people outside of my project. I don't want to take care of spam, synchronize ~/.evolution whenever I switch computers, configure mail server (and any other service that's not necessary... hell, I even use afraid.org so that I don't have to mess with bind. Web based solutions are great if all you care is ease of use, convenience and saving time.

Haven't tried any spreadsheets yet, but whenever (not often) I have to edit something that we've done in Excell (long time ago), OOo v.1.x (some time ago, b4 Ubuntu Breezy was out, I think) and OOo v.2.x, it's a real pain in the ass (converting to ods, taking care of permission, so that others can overwrite files, etc.). Having some hosted, based on ODF spreadsheet solution would be sweet.

If you want a wiki that is as easy to use as a word processor, may I recommend MoinMoinWiki. It's a Python based Wiki that has an AJAX GUI-mode editor, with nice friendly buttons to make text bold, choose heading types, etc. We use it at my place of work and its great.

MoinMoin has a WYSIWYG mode.

I use MoinMoin for a "personal wiki" to keep track of any little notes I want to keep. Its a lot more convenient than a bunch of text files.

I use a wiki because it's an easy format for me to edit and update wherever I am. I have no intention to make it writable - god we're getting enough feedback as it is :)

Would you know how to force a single language maybe?
You either have to deleted the Templates for alternative FrontPages: (StartSeite, PageD%27Accueil, P%C3%A1ginaPrincipal ...) or change "page_front_page" in the configuration to something moinmoin cant autotranslate (almost everything but FrontPage) and move you Frontpage there.
See "System pages, including FrontPage" on http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnLanguages?hig hlight=(language)
I would propably just go and kill any template I dont need on the wiki - problem solved.

Thanks for the great game BTW and keep up the good work!

Sweetshark, who will buy Quake 4 for his linux-only machine as a reward for finishing his diploma next week ....

I also recently had my TWiki-based wiki farm broken into, for the 3rd time in 4 years, despite trying to stay up to date at least with Debian releases. Fortunately, I had each wiki set up to run suexec as an individual user, so the damage was reasonably well contained.

Since TWiki's security problems seem intractable (giant Perl codebase that's very difficult to audit and doesn't seem to have been designed to handle security) I decided that enough is enough and followed freedesktop.org's lead in moving the whole farm to MoinMoin. MoinMoin is written in Python rather than Perl, and seems to be better thought out in terms of security, although I had to hack up the source some to get what I wanted. Some open source migration tools will be made available shortly.

I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they run a publically-viewable TWiki installation at this point.

I haven't set up MediaWiki, but my coworkers and I chose MoinMoin because it doesn't require a database. We've been pleased with its ease of use, speed, and stability.

They have a Wiki Engine Comparison page that was useful for helping us decide which one best fit our needs.

I haven't set up MediaWiki, but my coworkers and I chose MoinMoin because it doesn't require a database. We've been pleased with its ease of use, speed, and stability.

They have a Wiki Engine Comparison page that was useful for helping us decide which one best fit our needs.

Software: moin-moin http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/. It worked well enough, easy to install, and it was easy to set up credentials and permissions for groups on the diretory and page level for editing and even visibility. It's easy to get in and make simple changes to the code and there's a bunch of modules available of varying quality, though.

Funny anecdote, our group's manager pulled a Lundberg: "I uhh like the program and it works well, but is there a WYSIWYG editor for it?" [Although somewhat idiosyncratic, Wiki markup is trivial to learn and use, HTML looks like C++ in comparison.]

You're having trouble managing all your projects. Take a project management class. Don't necessarily go for the certification. Then take a time management class. Get those fundamentals.

On the topic of an organizer, organized people can make just about anything work, disorganized and undisciplined people can't make the most simple and efficient system work. With that said, I enjoyed the Q4 (a Franklin Planner type of system) as long as I followed the system precisely. If started skipping steps, then I lost confidence in the system and the doubt slowed me down as I doublechecked everything.

As I started participating in Wikipedia (small contributions exclusively), I realized that I liked the system for automatically creating URLs. It seemed to be a great way to organize things. After evaluating a variety of personal wikis, I am currently trying out Moin Moin Desktop Edition. It's going well for me. I keep open three pages: ThingsToDo (running list of things to do), Expectations (running list of things that people are expected to get for me and when) and the current date. From there, I enclose anything I want to be able to track (people's names, important issues, etc.) in square brackets and double quotes. When I save the page, I then open a new tab for the uncreated pages (clearly marked with question mark links) and put in what I need to keep track of.

For me, all those features were really necessary. The paper system did it well, but the binding kept failing on me and I'm a better typer anyway. Next year, my calendar will be exceptionally important too, so I'm going to have to figure out if I can find a MoinMoin module to read Notes Calendars (if that's even the right way to attack the problem) or decide to manually track my meetings and appointments.

Of all the freeware wiki's I've installed on my testbed server http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ was the easiest to install and control.

Document Indexing/File Organization: A Wiki is the proper tool for this job, in my opinion. It makes it very easy to edit, and hyperlinking is instictive. You can easily attach documents to pages, you can usually export the whole thing as a directory tree. Most Wiki software also keeps track of all of the versions of a page, so you can worry less about making bad mistakes.

I've used both MoinMoin, which is a traditional web based Wiki, and WikiDpad, which is an IDE environment for Windows that does Wiki-like things. Both of these programs are open source, Python based applications.

You also might want to check out ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software, which stores thumbnails of images in a database (including SQL backends), along with keywords and user fields. It can help you as well.

--Mike--

Our wiki discribes everything from how to setup your development environment to how to use the office coffee machine. It's much easier to keep documentation reasonably up-to-date if anyone can write it, and it is much easier to find information if it doesn't consist of slogging through file heirchies to launch a PDF file. Instead of being 12 months out of date, our Wiki documentation is generally only about 3 months out of date, and the important stuff is actually (gasp!) up to date.

We use MoinMoin Wiki. Good setup, though formatting is a pain and tables are right out.

So what's needed is careful set up in the robots.txt file and other HTML clues for the web crawlers to exclude anything but the most current version of a page (and to skip over the other 'action' pages, like edits, etc).

It has probably already been done in any wiki software worth its salt. Here's what MoinMoin does for example:

* It has a regexp of HTTP_USER_AGENTS which should receive a FORBIDDEN for anything except viewing a page. The default setting includes many known bots (including Google) and utilities such as wget.
* Most pages contain the appropriate robot meta tag, whith the relevant noindex and/or nofollow settings.

In addition to that, the webmaster can of course set up a robots.txt file, and actually should do so because there are tools out there which don't understand the robot meta tags (or they don't want to take a performance hit) and the user agent of which can easily be changed by the user... wget comes to mind.

Of course, it shouldn't be too hard to add regexps to prevent certain links from being done, or certain hostnames or IPs from altering the site (editing pages, reverting them, deleting them).