Talk:Intranet adaptation

File type support

Why use .doc and .ppt which are not free and not fully supported in Linux for example ? Koxinga 19:17, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Because the company using the wiki as an intranet uses those formats all the time, and it's important to have them uploadable. This is an important point about using this software as an intranet, and the whole reason for this discussion - the wikipedia has hardwired restrictions (file types, upload size, etc) which are not necessarily appropriate for other uses. - Ao 20:43, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Corporate Intranet Wiki Adoption

The question is, how do you make people use the wiki? I set one up on our intranet at work a couple of months ago but only me and one other person, out of a department of 50, contribute anything to it. Angela 22:46, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think this is a very interesting question. There's lots of discussion on this on meatball wiki e.g meatball:WikiAdoption. There's similarities with the internet community building situation. For example seed posting (posting pages to kick things off) is obviously important. However the corporate wiki situation is certainly different. There's already a group of people who know each other, and share knowledge face-to-face, using email, or documents on a shared network drive. How to encourage those people to adopt a superior group-thinking wiki approach?

I tried to do this at the company I'm working at now. I set up a little demonstration. My manager didn't like the look of it, and told me to stop using it! One day they will learn... *sigh* -- Harry Wood 17:01, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Here's some interesting commments about intranet wikis, from people who have tried setting them up. Quite a good balance of opinion, including some people who utterly hated it. -- Harry Wood 13:40, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Targeting Corporate Use

I think we should expand this article and create more surrounding documentation, to take a leaf from Twiki's book. Those guys have a whole speil targeted at people trying to decide if they want to use a wiki system on their corporate intranet.

They have also tailored the software towards this use. I'm not saying we should do this. There's no need to make any sweeping changes to MediaWiki. I just think we should be 'marketing' it in this direction a bit better. After all MediaWiki software is better than Twiki (in my opinion), so it's a shame that these people would chose Twiki over MediaWiki at the moment, based on the quality of their sales pitch.

I know it's not as fun as talking about internet wiki collaboration, but I think it's an interesting growth area, and if more people are using MediaWiki at work, then more people will surely join online wiki communities as a result. -- Harry Wood 17:01, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

This is an excellent idea. This page really belongs on MediaWiki.org so I'd like to start a page there which sells the idea better. Perhaps a new name like Using MediaWiki for your corporate wiki ? I'll start a draft on my user page at User:Barrylb/Using MediaWiki for your corporate wiki -- Barrylb 04:00, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

enabling "file:" link

Hi there, Running a wiki on our corporate intranet, and we'd like to also be able to link to files on our windows network (file:// link).

Can you post instructions on how to do this? We're not exactly PHP experts, but still managing ;-) Thanks! Dave

Well without changing with mediawiki code at all, you could just create links as external URLs, with the file:// prefix as you say. This has a few problems.

* Not all browsers support file:// prefix.

* Everyone must have acess to these file resources with the same path (and same drive letter mappings. Usually a good idea anyway)

* If you have file names with spaces, then you will need to convert spaces to excape chars when you link. I found this Ninotech Path Copy useful (use the 'copy internet path' feature)

There should really be an extension or patch which makes it easier to link to shared network files on an intranet wiki, but not sure if anyone's made this yet. -- Harry Wood 13:53, 25 October 2005 (UTC)