I too am trying to decide between CMS or Wiki.

It seems to me that the main difference is the level of complexity. Most CMS systems I have looked at are capable of creating much richer content than the wikis, but it comes at the cost of usability. Without expception, all CMS systems that I looked at were far too complex to be able to expect a large group of inexperienced users to be willing to get in and figure out how to create content. On the other hand, every wysiwyg enabled wiki is extremely easy to use for content creation, despite various design and content limitations.

I would really like to find a good blend of the two for comunity content develoment. does anyone have any suggestions?

Hi all,

as gadget-guy has already mentioned, wikis are a sub-class of CMS, I'd better call a wiki a "CMS-light-light"

From my experience (did several evaluations of CMS over the years, and have been confronted with wikis; managing several CMS for a major customer > 10000 employees) I can say, that wikis can fulfill requirements of private life or 'non-commercial-organisations' or small comapnies, but usually they are to 'light' for major business objectives.

If you have the need to provide a communication and/or collaboration platform inside your company (> 500 employees), maybe because you want to collect information from differnt users which are located on diffent sites, maybe worldwide, then a wiki is not enough, you need something more flexible, and yes, powerful.

Here some major issues a professional CMS can provide, and wikis (usually) do not:

Security ==> you need a flexible access control (based on users and groups, even nested...), you need a bullet porrf system

Scalability ==> to be able to adjust system architecture to increasing system-load, e.g. distribution of processes across many servers

Support ==> you need a well performing vendor/partner you can rely on. Usually you have a support contract, which offers help with problems and is offering system upgrades (wikis are often open source... what if the open-source-community decides, not to do any work anymore on this open-source-project? You might have thousands of documents/contents in there, with maybethousands of users using it; and then after 3 years you have to upgrade to a newer operating systems, the wiki-software is not running on --> you boss will blame you for the tool-decision)...or a new browser (e.g. IE7) is launched; someone has to be IN CHARGE to guarantee that the system is working with the new browser, or at least to make it working FAST!

Integration / interfaces ==> your system needs interfaces to commonly used systems in companies, like LDAP, SAP, search engines, network drivesetc., and mechanisms for single-sing-on, etc..., or powerful import/export-interfaces
By te way, with our CMS here we do even have a integration into Windows file explorer; by using this plugin, a user can access the CMS via web browser, if he wants to focus on content retrieval, but can easily access the CMS via file explorer to, e.g. in order to open a PDF/WORD/EXCEL etc. like from a network drive (dblclick) or to upload files from his hard drive to the CMS with drag & drop or copy&paste, like with a network drive... our users LOVE that, well its more or less a key success factor here for our customer and for the accesptance of the users...


Anyway, there are several types of CMS, some are intended to support users to 'easily' create static html pages for an intranet (I call it "few-to-many-approach ==> a group of users are creating content for all the other users (read only), other CMS are more meant for collaboration, where every user can read AND write/provide content & documents, as needed, but always controlled by access rights, which are able to be managed by the users themselves, not by an admin (=decentralized approach)...

Well, just a short abstract of my knowledge, hope that helps... ;-)

best regards

Hello,

I agree -- today Wikis can scale up to handle tons of users. We have instances of customers that have scaled to this level seamlessly.

I also agree with the fact that software products need to be supported -- ideally by teams that have built the Wiki and know the entrails of the application. SamePage has always supported its customers, and help through any OS/browser/platform issues as well as through upgrades.

Our Wiki integrates well with LDAP, LDAP groups and nested LDAP groups. We support Single sign on, including Windows NTLM integration(in the next release). My guess is other Wikis also provide similar functionality.

Our team's take is the biggest difference between CMS systems and Wikis is the philosophy of the product: Wikis are meant to foster a more inclusive and egaliatarian dialogue; CMS systems were more hierarachial and in the 'Command and Control mode'; Wikis are more democratic and participatory. The architecure of Wikis naturally lends itself to this kind od dialogue.

Please check out our White paper: http://www.etouch.net/products/collabor … ePaper.pdf for our team's thoughts on these issues.

With Best Regards

The SamePage Team

Last edited by SamePageTeam (2007-06-02 02:00:20)