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I inherited the task of taking over documentation for a project. It is mostly software developers, but there are a few fairly non-technical people who don't like wikis and really love Word.

The thing that they requested was something that would allow them to upload a Word doc and have it be converted to a wiki page and also export a page into a Word doc. And ideally it should be runnable on the Microsoft stack (or at least not have MySQL as a backend). Uploading a Word doc as an attachment isn't probably going to satisfy them.

I'm not personally aware of a wiki platform that does this, but I figured I'd ask. I've been looking at ScrewTurn and it looks pretty for our needs, except for that Word thing.

edit: Ok, screwturn was a bad idea. I didn't realize how big of an ugly stick it had been beaten with. Looking at xwiki now.

swilliams
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5 Answers5

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I know XWiki has some kind of Office tool. It seems to be what you are looking for. Never tried it myself, so cannot tell you how well it performs in practice, but the Wiki itself is open source, so trying out should be easy.

http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Products/XOffice

rumtscho
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3

Confluence has pretty good integration with Word - but I think it runs on MySQL. We used it at my last company and I was pretty impressed.

Aerik
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Mindtouch, Enterprise version, has good integration with MS Office via the Desktop Connector Suite. with it one can publish from Word to the wiki with a button push. The result is a wiki page which is usually faithful to the original, including inline images. The source document is attached to the page so one can always see it as intended.

Double clicking on the attached office doc (any type) opens the associated program. When the file is saved or closed the attached version is automatically updated. Attachments are versioned.

There is an API and command line tools which enable scripting of the above process.

It's a great tool, however it only works with the commercial version of Mindtouch. There is a Community Mindtouch Desktop Suite which works with Mindtouch Core, the open source version. It does not have the MS Office integration, but one can interact with the wiki using a Windows Explorer like interface and drag and drop files to/from the wiki, where they are stored as attachments.

Both desktop suites have a common heritage and the core/commercial wiki engines are identical so one could, in principle, add office integration to the community edition. That this has not happened to date indicates it would be significant undertaking.

As for the server, it can be installed on Microsoft Server 2003+ and use IIS though it still bundles mysql. Through Enterprise Adapters it can draw from/to any industry standard database. The easiest way to try it out is through a linux vmware appliance though (hosted on Windows if you wish).

New this summer is Mindtouch Platform v.10 which appears to be a hybrid of Mindtouch Core and Enterprise, and mentions the desktop suite.

matt wilkie
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I don’t know if you are still looking for an answer, but we built a wiki that does just that called WordonWiki.

Synetech
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Roland
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I'm thinking Confluence is your best bet. We import word docs every now and then and as long as there's nothing too funky in doc, it works fine.

This plugin for Confluence (commercial) also makes going to and from Word a pretty good experience (I hear).

This has been a large enough pressure point (critical feature) that they've actually put some work into getting it mostly right.

PS. Confluence supports multiple databases including the obvious/popular ones.

Mark Gibaud
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