19 May 2006 - 11:54 in tagged , , , , , by MartinCleaver
Every wiki has its own markup, but how well designed are they? One way to tell is to see how hard it is to use a different markup
TWiki, Confluence, Note Studio – I use all of these and they all have proprietary mark-up (e.g. text-only representations of how to do *bold*)

Its not a problem until I want to push the content beyond the scope of the application. I enter stuff on my Palm Treo 650 copy of Note Studio – I want it to appear on the company wiki. Even if I can get the content over there it would need reformatting.

Bayle Shanks (who I met at WikiSym2005) wrote a wiki gateway to handle the API part of submitting content to a generic interface. I wrote the TWiki:Codev.SyncContrib (although it remains fairly uobscured in TWiki's SVN) but that only handles TWiki-TWiki syncronisation. And AcroWiki appears to have been completely abandoned by Acrocat software presumably because they have made a name for themselves on pdaabs and acrowiki is not core to what they do.

This leaves me with an integration gap. And while I as a techie could solve it I neither have the time nor inclination to do so. Further, integration is a key step to simplicity: most users see such problems as completely insumountable.

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About

Martin Cleaver specialises in Wiki Consulting for Helix Commerce International.

Martin has worked in Enterprise Application Integration and now focuses on Knowledge Integration.

He holds a Masters of Computing Software and Systems Design (1995) and a Masters of Business Administration (2004).

 
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