Posted on Apr 10, 2007 12:00:00 AM | SamePage Team | 0 Comments
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This is a topic that has come up almost every time we have talked to customers about a wiki deployment within their enterprise. For a lot of folks out there, "secure wiki" may be an oxymoron - Isn't wiki all about social networking and a free, democratic environment that encourages everyone to contribute? Try telling that to someone in an enterprise and he will think you are out of your mind. While Wikipedia may be a great example of a mass collaboration site, there are enough instances of vandalism, wrong or biased information to make it unacceptable within most organizations. There is little doubt that security is imperative to ensure that the right people are reading and editing the content. On the other hand we all know from experience that if you make the security too tight and complex, you will turn away a lot of users thereby reducing adoption.
Then comes the question of how much content and functionality should one expose? Should you have to expose the whole wiki with thousands of pages to every user in the organization to "encourage collaboration"? What if Marketing wants to have its own wiki separate from the Sales wiki? What about partners or customers - can you expose parts of the wiki to get their contribution? What if I want the wiki to be available to everyone but the Home Page should be controlled by a few? Can I have a wiki for the IT group that others can read and comment? In larger organizations requirements become even more complex - integration with LDAP and single-sign, nested groups and so on.
Though we can't claim that SamePage can address every situation, we can say in all fairness that it is much more enterprise-ready than most other wikis. Essentially SamePage offers much more granular security so you can have different levels of security for different wikis. Instead of thinking of SamePage as one giant wiki you can think of it as a collection of smaller wikis (called Projects) with inter-linked pages. Every Project in SamePage can have a different security configuration that is decided by the Project Owner. It can be opened to specific members, to all registered users , to anonymous users or some combination of the above. You can define different levels of security - Read, Read+Comment, Read+Comment+Edit and so on. Project membership can be assigned to specific users or groups which could be optionally pulled from your corporate LDAP so you can simply leverage existing hierarchies and groups. Further, within a Project, you can override the default permissions at a Page level - so certain sensitive pages can restricted to specific members. Since Pages can be linked and words can be searched across Projects, you don't really miss the concept of one giant wiki. Features like RSS and Include plugins further allow you to mesh together content from different Projects while ensuring access privileges are respected at all times. Audit trails and Versioning further help you to trace any accidental or malicious edits and quickly undo them.
This approach helps you to leverage the openness and viral nature of a wiki without compromising on the basic security of who gets to see or edit what.
Tags : Concept, Rationale for a feature
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