Mediawiki vs SharePoint
=======================
:author: Aaron Ball
:email: nullspoon@iohq.net

A ways back I began toying with MediaWiki as a proof of concept/research
mission. As I slowly learned its capabilities, I started to realize that it had
really great potential as a replacement for Microsoft Office SharePoint. I'm
not saying that for religious reasons either. A few reasons I think it
supercedes SharePoint are...


[[mediawiki-pros]]
== MediaWiki Pros

* Its markup makes writing documentation fast and easy (wow that felt
  like an infomercial)

* It doesn't require any particular browser to be fully functional (or
  even partially functional)

* Document editing is done in browser without the need of external
  software

* Check-out and check-in/save are done in two steps unlike with
  SharePoint where you must download a document, check it out so no one can
  make changes while you are working on it, make your changes in MS Word, save
  changes in MS Word, upload new version to SharePoint, fill out changelog
  information, and delete the local copy on your computer to avoid clutter and
  having multiple copies of one document. That might have been a bit over
  exaggerated but certainly not by much.

* MediaWiki tracks content. SharePoint tracks documents. They both
  provide versioning but because of MediaWiki's content tracking, it can
  perform letter-by-letter comparisons on different article versions easily
  in-browser and without extra plugins (ActiveX, I'm looking at you!)

* It has user pages which notify users if a change was made, making them
  ideal for assigning tasks to members of a team.

* Permissions are rarely a concern (when should you be putting super
  sensitive information in unencrypted docs on a document repository anyway) as
  where in most SharePoint setups, permissions are often fought with. However,
  Mediawiki's permissions structure is simpler and less robust so this isn't
  necessarily a pro or a con.

* MediaWiki is cheaper and uses fewer resources as a LAMP or WAMP stack
  requires a far less powerful machine and far less money in licensing fees
  than a Windows server running IIS and MSSQL.

* Mediawiki is very fluid with its templating system and various popular
  extensions (one of my favorites is
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions[ParserFunctions])
  which allow it to be tailored to almost any project need without the
  need of an expensive developement team

* MediaWiki is the software used by
  http://www.wikipedia.org/[Wikipedia], so support and development for it won't
  be going away any time soon. Backwards compatibility will also be maintained
  for a very long time because one of the biggest and most popular sites on the
  internet has a vested interest in it working well with their current setup

* MediaWiki is secure, again because it is used by
  http://www.wikipedia.org/[Wikipedia]. It can be assumed that such a high
  profile site is under constant attack and investigation. How many times have
  you seen Wikipedia go down because of a hack? How many times have you seen a
  SharePoint site go down just because of daily use?

* It also supports a standardized wiki markup language so it can be ported to
  other products much easier than a SharePoint shared docs site can.


[[sharepoint-pros]]
== SharePoint Pros

* As mentioned, SharePoint's permissions structure is more robust than
  MediaWiki's but again, this isn't really a pro or a con, just a difference.

* A SharePoint Shared Docs library can be mounted as a Windows share
  allowing _seemingly_ local editing of documents.

* SharePoint integrates easily into Active Directory. MediaWiki does too, but
  not by default.

* Windows admins should feel more comfortable administering SharePoint.
  Mediawiki is certainly easier to use, but requires a different skillset to
  set up and administer as it runs on a different server setup entirely (eg:
  Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

* SharePoint supports browser-based calendars with a backend in Exchange
  offering mostly seamless integration of team calendars between Outlook and
  the team site. MediaWiki has nothing like this.

That's all for now. If I think up more pros for either, I'll update the
list here.


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