Looking for a wiki for your team or organization? Do you need to host it on-site, or would you like one that’s hosted for you and ready to go? Do you need to integrate it with other enterprise tools, like email, SharePoint, or your intranet? These are just a couple of the important questions you’ll likely be asking, and one of the following wiki tools may be the right one for you.

There are multiple products built specifically for use by organizations, with such capabilities and features as:

• Workspaces – organize information by group, project, product, etc.
• Permissions – set read and edit permissions for individual pages or entire spaces.
• User Management/LDAP – integrate with central user stores, like Active Directory
• Notifications – get notified by email or RSS when a page is updated.
• Design & Branding – match the look and feel of your website, intranet, etc.
• Discussion – threaded discussion can take place right alongside the content on wiki pages. For example, if you’re using the wiki for your employee handbook, someone can ask a question, clarify a policy, or suggest a refinement.
• Industry-Standard Databases – Oracle, MySQL, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server
• Templates – placeholder text people can use to spark activity on newly created pages.

Click on any image to zoom in for a closer look at each tool.

CenterStage

CenterStage is a collaboration tool built by EMC, maker of the widely used Documentum content management system. It uses the same content repository as Documentum, and provides team workspaces with wikis, blogging, discussion forums, and search that includes CenterStage, SharePoint, file shares, email archives, and content management systems. CenterStage supports what EMC calls “extended enterprise” collaboration with people outside an organization, such as customers, clients, and partners.

Confluence

Atlassian makes the Confluence enterprise wiki that is widely used inside organizations of all sizes. Confluence has the ability to host multiple wiki workspaces for teams and departments, page-level permissions, threaded discussions on wiki pages, notifications by email or RSS, single sign-on integration (LDAP/Active Directory), and a library of 300+ plugins including Balsamiq (wireframe mockups), Gliffy (flow charts), and SharePoint integration.

EditMe

EditMe is a hosted wiki service that launched to the public in 2003, and has steadily grown since then. In 2007, the company introduced a service to build custom designs, integration with customers’ sign-in systems and account databases, custom features, and more. It’s a good combination of the convenience of a hosted wiki, and the flexibility to add and customize as needed.

GroupSwim

GroupSwim Collaboration is an on-demand tool that includes a wiki, groups, discussions, and file sharing. GroupSwim has page-level permissions, and wiki pages can include images, tables, links, and widgets. Discussions are automatically rated based on the frequency of activity, so you can quickly see which ones are most active.

GroupSwim Community is designed to support public communities, such as a forum for customers to get answers and share valuable information. It gives you the ability to see what’s most important to them, and quickly identify & resolve issues. Optional add-ons let you share files like training documents & white papers, and invite customers to provide input using a wiki.

Mac OS X Wiki Server

Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) Wiki Server is part of Mac OS X Server, which runs on Apple’s Xserve and Mac Pro servers. Wiki Server combines a wiki, group calendar, blog, and mailing list, and gets group memberships & permissions directly from the account repository in Mac OS X Server.

No knowledge of markup language or syntax is necessary – all editing is done via a rich text editor that looks similar to the standard text editor in other popular software tools. Wiki Server includes 20 built-in themes with a variety of layouts, colors, and font styles, and you can customize workspaces with a logo (useful for branding the wiki with your organization’s logo, or including logos for specific projects or products). You can also view the contents of documents attached to the wiki without downloading them, so you can find the information you need.

MindTouch

MindTouch makes Deki is an enterprise collaboration and community platform that has a wiki at its core, and allows you to integrate with other tools like blogs, CRM (customer relationship management) systems, content management systems, and produce dynamic reports.

MindTouch is available in hosted and on-premise versions, and the company also offers an open source version. The free hosted and open source versions give you an opportunity to try out the software and contribute to its development, and the pro hosted and on-premise versions give you the full features, integration options, scalability, security, and support.

MindTouch powers the Washington Post’s recently launched Who Runs Gov, a source of information on government officials, advisors, and policies.

PBworks

PBworks offers a hosted wiki that’s designed specifically for Law firms and Creative agencies. The company also offers its wiki for academic use at a significant discount.

Project Edition is a version of the company’s hosted wiki that’s designed for the client-facing projects common to professional services firms, such as consultancies, accounting firms, design, PR, advertising, and marketing agencies. The new software combines PBworks’ wiki collaborative platform with a project coordination workspace that enables more traditional project management activities like progress tracking, task list, organizing tasks into project milestones, and conducting discussions associated with task list items.

PBworks Legal Edition combines a wiki with case management capabilities, a customizable legal knowledge base, and an electronic deal room to manage files that require legal review, input, and approval. It also includes full encryption of all pages and files, and a comprehensive audit long that tracks all activity in the wiki. Data can be filtered by page/folder, user, or IP address, and can be downloaded for further analysis.

SamePage

SamePage is an enterprise wiki that provides the ability to host multiple wiki workspaces for teams and projects, manage and share documents, and use blogs to communicate within and between teams. It’s available in hosted or on-premise versions, and the on-premise version supports “multi-tenancy” – the ability to run multiple, separate instances of SamePage that can each contain multiple workspaces and are independent from each other for security.

eTouch recently hosted an online seminar with the Aberdeen Group on the Recession-Ready Wiki. Here’s my summary and liveblog of the event.

Socialtext

Socialtext includes wiki workspaces, collaborative spreadsheets, micro-messaging, an employee social network, and a dashboard for each person to customize with information feeds from the wiki, other organizational data sources, and the Internet.

The software also supports what the company calls collaborative weblogs – one person can tag a particular wiki page as a weblog entry, and others can use the same tag to build a running chronology of information and updates. Multiple tags can be used to associate pages with multiple weblogs when necessary.

Socialtext is available in both a hosted version and an on-premise appliance. The appliance can be installed on your premises, or in Socialtext’s data center. The company also offers connectors for SharePoint and Lotus Connections.

Swirrl

Swirrl is a hosted web application that allows you to store, share, edit, and analyze information. It provides wiki pages that can contain text, images, and spreadsheets, and files cam be uploaded and associated with pages. Permissions can be set at the page level, and can be applied to attached documents, presentations, and other files.

Swirrl is offered as a hosted tool, but you can get in touch to discuss other options, such as hosting it as an on-premise service behind your organization’s firewall, hosting it on a dedicated server in Swirrl’s data center, or to create a custom hosted plan that goes beyond the standard plans offered.

ThoughtFarmer

ThoughtFarmer is described by its creators as Social Intranet Software. It combines traditional intranet features – news, structured content, search and an employee directory – with social software features, like blogs, feeds, wikis and social networks.

ThoughtFarmer also includes discussion forums, notifications by email and RSS, calendars that can be collaboratively built and exported for use in Outlook and iCal, document management (including revision history), navigation and structure that’s suggested as you build your workspace. Discussion Capture is a new feature in ThoughtFarmer that can capture the contents of email discussions within a group, maintain the conversation threading, formatting and attachments, index them for search, and link the conversation to profiles in the People Directory for added context and background information.

ThoughtFarmer is an on-premise tool that runs on servers behind your organization’s firewall. It integrates with user accounts via Active Directory, and supports single sign-on using Windows Integrated Authentication.

Traction TeamPage

Traction TeamPage is an enterprise wiki with the ability to host multiple workspaces, page level permissions, a rich text editor, threaded discussions, tagging, search, page and comment moderation, blogging, and templates. TeamPage also provides email notifications, an email reply feature that posts a copy of your reply to the team workspaces, and The Collector, a tool that allows you to bookmark pages for follow-up.

TeamPage provides the ability to build customized displays of information, such as dashboards to track progress of a project, and the ability to create custom plugins, themes, and widgets. It typically runs as an on-premise tool behind your organization’s firewall or in your DMZ, integrates with user accounts via LDAP or Active Directory, and also allows for a combination of LDAP/AD accounts and accounts created within TeamPage when needed (i.e. an account created for a client who is not in your orgnization’s central database). TeamPage also is offered on a shared or dedicated Amazon cloud server.

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• Sharepoint, Confluence, MindTouch who is best?

If you’d like to see all the wikis available for a wide variety of uses, please visit WikiMatrix.