Collaborative Knowledge Creation with Zimbra

[ewilen]

While our evaluation of Zimbra as a groupware solution has mainly focused on calendaring/mail features, a conversation with a friend has me thinking about the Documents/Notebook portion of Zimbra.

It seems to me that the AJAX technology and Documents feature of Zimbra Web Client would be an excellent start toward a wiki module, or a wiki-like feature, that would allow user contribution toward an expanding organizational knowledge base. In the process Zimbra could overcome what I believe is the chief deficiency of wikis as currently implemented, namely the ugly and far-from-transparent markup codes they use.

In the meantime, I wonder if anyone has worked up best practices for creating a shared document base. It might seem trivial but I'd appreciate any tips on potential pitfalls. (Off the top of my head, I'm wondering how intra-Zimbra links within documents work, and also how to manage tracking revisions and doing rollbacks.)

[Chewie71]

Hi Elliot...

We've looked at doing this with Zimbra documents but haven't gotten much past talking about it. I know that it keeps document history, and there is an option to "revert" a document back to a different revision.

Each document has it's own URL path, so I'm sure you could link internally to another document.

It's also all indexed....so you can use the Zimbra Search feature to find documents that meet certain criteria.

Matt

[ewilen]

Thank you. When I have time I'll look further into this. Based on what I found at wikipedia (comparison of wiki software) it seems there are some wikis out there with good editing features, not only Confluence which is commercial, but apparently some FOSS projects as well. Perhaps one of them could partner with Zimbra. Or a Zimlet could provide an easy interface to one of them (and maybe this has already been done).