Your Online Presence > Delivering Services via the Web, Managing Content
Software > Open Source

Of wikis, collaborative working and private social networks

By Lasa Information Systems Team

From the files of the UKRiders mailing list comes this question and replies on using software or cloud services to support collaborative working.

“I’d be interested in recommendations / possible options / experiences as to collaborative software, particularly wikis, collaborative work spaces and project management. Currently, I’m thinking along the lines of Media Wiki, Huddle, PB Works, Wikispaces and similar.

To give some background, I want to support small, community-based advice services to think about how they might be able to set up their own collaborative work space. Cost is definitely an issue, as are ease of use and searching, tagging, indexing of information and data protection. I’d also be interested in any thoughts on the options for where the data can be held / and how easily it can be transferred elsewhere.”

What follows is not a comprehensive list, but just some of the software and services that are available and have been used or trialled by UKRiders members.

Wikis

Media Wiki is open source wiki software which was written in PHP for Wikipedia – so it’s pretty well used. It is not a cloud service so it would need to be hosted on a web server which has provision for PHP/My SQL. A comment was that ”personally, I’ve come to love Media Wiki, but my experience is that users get put off by not having a WYSIWYG editor for text.”

WikiSpaces, billed as “Wikis without the learning curve”, is free for individuals and groups. The package includes WYSIWYG editing, a discussion forum, 2Gb of file storage, unlimited pages and members. Our Rider commented that they had been "moderately successful in introducing a decidedly non-tech end-user community group to WikiSpaces".

Collaboration and project management

Huddle is a cloud-based online collaboration and project management service. Huddle licences are available as part of the CTX donated software scheme. UKRiders said that it was “easy to get started and very user-friendly interface, dispersed teams can collaborate and share files, project tasks and calendars. Good help guides and great for more functional collaborative work. It's largely all there as an entry level cloud project management tool, off the peg, and quite intuitive to use”.

Basecamp  didn’t get a mention in the discussion but an application of it can be read in the knowledgebase article Online Collaboration Tools. It’s a mature collaboration service that includes message boards (to avoid all that messy emailing to and fro), document storage, calendaring and task allocation - but does cost from $49 US per month. There’s a mobile version too.

PBWorks is an online team collaboration service which is primarily business and education oriented (lots of pictures of smartly-dressed shiny, happy people in nice offices) but does offer a free version for non-commercial use.

Open Atrium billed as “a team collaboration tool” is open source (as its name implies)  and has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to-do list, a shoutbox (a sort of internal Twitter), and a dashboard to manage it all. A UKRider comment was that it was "too cartoony (default colours and icons), ended up doing a bit of image customisation and theme re-colouring”.

Redmine is a web-based open source project management application which incorporates a gannt chart and calendar, flexible issue tracking system, news, document and file management, feeds and email notifications, per project wiki, per project forums and time tracking. There’s an online demo site.

Private social networks

The discussion also ranged into private social networks such as Yammer, a free private social network for organisations and networks. "Great on tagging and conversations and now has new features that mean files as well as people can be followed. Also features pages for collaborative document building."

Ning, sadly no longer free, is, again, a private social network and has been  used by organisations like NAVCA for their navcaboodle voluntary sector networking and discussion site. Priced between £2.95 and £39.95 per month depending on the number of users, storage and feature needs, Ning comes with a number of themes which are easily customised.

Other similar social networks include SocialGo,  WackWall and Grou.ps.

Content Management Systems with some social elements

Webjam creates a free website which has a social media platform and file sharing and other modules. You can create as many websites as you wish, but not manage them from a central hub. For own domain and branding it costs £99 per year. It is possible to control all of the sites from a central hub but additional cost would be involved.

Drupal Gardens, as the name suggest, is built on the Drupal open source CMS. It’s free for small groups (less than 5 logins) and $99 per annum beyond that... "You can export everyone if you need, granular permissions, powerful views, modules for everything under the sun"

Roll the credits

Thanks to Dal Warburton at Advice UK for raising the subject and rounding up the answers from Ground Floor Project, Phil Anthony, Michael Mann, David Moreton, Nick Plant, Paul Webster and Steven Flower.