Wiki

**WARNING - Geek Material Ahead**

I have a new boss at work, who is trying to facilitate communication among groups.  He initially wanted to have a whiteboard of all existing projects and issues that everyone could read.  That seemed a little archaic to me, so I suggested a Wiki: a web site where people can read, add and remove content.  I recruited another member from my department to help me on my journey.  He suggested TWiki, since he used it at another place he worked.  Things did not go so well.  TWiki is designed to run on Linux, which normally would not be a problem.  However, we had to use this on an existing server and no Linux servers were available.  Therefore, it had to run on Windows.  We got the Apache and Perl to work, and installed TWiki, but for some reason we could not get everything to work together.  I suggested we try MediaWiki, which is what Wikipedia uses.  We downloaded a WAMP package (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) which could not have been easier to install.  Lo' and behold the WAMP package included MediaWiki.  All we had to do was to set up some minor configuration options like IP addresses, database names and user accounts/privileges and we were up and running.

Now everyone in our group can document their projects and see the status of others.  We envision using this Wiki as our one-stop-shop for all information in the department, including on-call schedules, documentation and log files.  The few people that have been shown how to use this have fallen in love with the new Wiki.  Hard to believe that something so easy to install is going to make me look like a hero.