What is a good wiki/collaboration tool for non-technical users? [closed]

Question

As a technical person, I find wikis are a great tool for collaborating and organizing information. The instantly shared, accessible, revision/version tracked, and interlinked nature of the documents/pages make it a valuable and convenient tool. I can't stand using Word now and try to avoid using it if at all possible.

I am starting a project with a non-technical person and suggested using a wiki to collaborate and capture our ideas. This was met with resistance due to all the 'weird brackets and stuff' and the desire to just 'type normally'. The counter suggestion was creating a folder somewhere to store Word documents in a folder structure with files named based on the date of the revision. I cringed.

So the question is, what is a good tool that provides wiki-type collaboration features with Word's 'ease of use' [sic] (a.k.a. WYSIWYG)?

Answer 1

Google Sites

• simple
• WYSIWYG
• support for Google Docs, Google Calendar and others Google's services
• Overview

Answer 2

We use Confluence for both our wikis (internal and public). It isn't free, but it is probably one of the most powerful wiki packages available, and is very easy for nontechnical people to use.

At past employers, I have implemented a variety of wiki sites with several different packages, and I've found PmWiki, Dokuwiki and TikiWiki to be reasonably easy to use for non-technical folk, as the markup is sensible enough that its easy to remember how to do a lot of the common things like bulleted/numbered lists, tables, and colors.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of Wiki packages, and notes most that have WYSIWYG functionality.

That said, I would consider wikis that you like, and encourage your colleague to learn common wiki markup, as it isn't a bad skill to develop :-).

Answer 3

I would say just use a shared google doc. It is basically word and can easily be used for collaboration and sharing.

Answer 4

Zoho wiki is free (for 2 smallish wiki's) and has a WYSIWYG editor.

Answer 5

TiddlyWiki is a good product that's pretty simple to use

Answer 6

As noted in answer to a similar question (search for that using the wiki tag) posted about a week after this question, XAMPP is used to run a wiki engine, it is not the wiki engine, as explained in an up date and one of the answers, including comments, to the similar question:

The earlier answer to the similar question was up dated by its author after the comments, below:

XAMPP will help you setup MediaWiki easily.More on that at WikiHow: How to Setup Mediawiki in XAMPP. There is also a related link on installing MediaWiki independently at the bottom of that page.

Here are the comments to that earlier answer:

MediaWiki is also relatively simple to set up, and has lots of users which means good availability of support and extensions, etc. In many cases it wouldn't be a bad choice at all for internal business use. – Jonik Aug 6 at 12:05

Probably worth clarifying that XAMPP isn't actually a wiki itself; it's just a platform for setting up a working PHP application server, which in turn eases setup time for MediaWiki. – Rob Aug 6 at 19:52

+1 MW has a terrific API which is great for generating metrics on documents (submissions, categories, etc.) – bedwyr 2 days ago (August 8)

Answer 7

It may be to late, but I would use the Business Collaboration Network (BCN) by DRE Software (www.dresoftware.com). It is primarily targeted towards sales and marketing professionals to collaborate with clients and prospects. That is important because it means many of the users are casual users so the application has to be simple and intuitive. They also offer web conferencing as part of thier standard package, which makes it a really unique offering. Give them a try.

Answer 8

The XAMPP setup is quite easy to start and manage.
It is open-source, cross-platform, freeware and comes with

• Apache HTTP Server
• MySQL
• PHP
• Perl

XAMPP requires only one zip, tar or exe file to be downloaded and run, and little or no configuration of the various components that make up the web server is required.

It is also available as a portable application (to run from USB sticks).