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Wikis v SharePoint

Should you use a Wiki or SharePoint to collaborate within your organisation? This is the question asked in this excellent blog post which I saw in Google Reader.

In the post the author compares some of the features of a wiki specifically Confluence with SharePoint. I love the idea of a wiki as a note pad that is a tool that is "open, ad-hoc authoring, pre-process, pre-agreements, pre-editing" compare that to SharePoint which the author describes as a book "formal, post-agreement, edited, published"

The author then describes some of the potential pitfalls or issues with using SharePoint in preference to other tools. The biggest of these has to be the Control vs. ad-hoc content creation issue. There is no doubt that collaborative tools like Wikis and especially Confluence which is the wiki the author compares to SharePoint allow for the creation of content both easily and quickly. Unfortunately for some organisations this will cause some concern hence why we're seeing many choose SharePoint in preference to other collaborative tools.

To conclude, the author describes how he sees Wikis sitting alongside SharePoint "think that?s how Confluence is positioning itself in a Sharepoint world ? wikis give people an unstructured ?scratch pad?, and this casual, early-stage idea environment can be effectively coupled with the more controlled, structured file/process/workflow management of SharePoint"

This is a great post which is well worth reading.

Full post as published by LI Issues on November 09, 2010 (boomark / email).