Your own enterprise-grade company wiki in minutes

What is a wiki?

According to wikipedia:


Is Interspire Knowledge Manager wiki software?

Yes. Right out of the box, Interspire Knowledge Manager includes features that allow you to run your own enterprise-grade company wiki. These features include:

• Quick edit to make changes to articles as you're viewing them in real-time.
• Article history so you can see which changes were made by who and when they were made.
• Integrated search to easily find the articles you or your staff need.
• Groups with their own assignable permissions and access levels.
• Feedback mechanisms to encourage staff participation.
• Simple publishing and authoring of content from your web browser.

How does a wiki work?

Interspire Knowledge Manager is installed on your web server, either locally (intranet) or remotely (website). It runs off the most popular combination of open source technologies in the world: PHP and MySQL.

Your staff access the wiki, and changes are saved to a highly optimized MySQL database. Interspire Knowledge Manager includes a built-in backup system which means it takes just a few clicks to create a copy of your wiki, which you can then store offsite for safe keeping.

The MySQL database is created for you automatically during the browser-based installation wizard. Before the release of Interspire Knowledge Manager we spent weeks on database optimization, and you'll be glad to know you can store tens of thousands of articles in your wiki and they are viewable, editable and searchable at lightning speed.



How are wikis different to content management systems?

According to wikipedia, wikis have shared and encouraged several features with generalized content management systems (CMS), which are used by enterprises and communities-of-practice. Those looking to compare a CMS with an enterprise wiki should consider these basic features:

• The name of an article is embedded in the hyperlink.
• Articles can be created or edited at anytime by anyone (with certain limitations for protected articles).
• Articles are editable through the web browser.
• Each article provides one-click access to the history/versioning page, which also supports version differencing ("diff") and retrieving prior versions.
• The most recent additions/modifications of articles can be monitored actively or passively.
• Easy revert of changes is possible.

Do other companies use wikis?

Yes. We have thousands of customers who use Interspire Knowledge Manager to power their enterprise grade wikis. They use Interspire Knowledge Manager to share knowledge across their department or even entire company. Using the built-in group-level permissions, you can create different groups for sales, marketing, HR, development, etc. You can then limit which areas of the wiki your staff have access to, depending on which group they belong to.

Is it easy for my staff to edit the wiki?

Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages.

With Interspire Knowledge Manager, you can view a complete history of every change ever made to an article. You see the date the change was made and who it was made by. You can even see the changes or rollback to a previously edited version of an article if you don't like the changes that were made:




The quick edit feature lets your staff edit article content on the fly, whenever they need to. This ties in well with the history system, so you can see who made the changes.

Your staff don't have to deal with a complicated wiki syntax when editing articles - they use the simple built-in WYSIWYG editor to make changes. They can format text, insert links or images, and even paste content directly from desktop programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel.

Where can I learn more?

The Interspire Knowledge Manager feature tour is a great place to start. If you'd like to take the hands-on approach, the live online demo will allow you to try Interspire Knowledge Manager and see how easy it is to add and modify articles. Finally, if you have any questions you can contact us by phone or email and we'll be happy to help.