I’ve been playing with this open source collaboration/wiki/mashup software for a couple of weeks now and I have to say that I’m very impressed with it so far.

I set up a wiki website at work almost two years ago using the MediaWiki engine mainly for sharing documentations, which works fine but it could have been much better if certain features came built-in with it.

MindTouch Deki has all these features that I wanted and a lot more. It’s really designed for enterprise use and that’s why I’m migrating our wiki to this:

• Active Directory/LDAP authentication with SSL/TLS support. There is an LDAP authentication extension for MediaWiki as well which works pretty well but with MindTouch Deki it’s built-in and easier to set up. It also supports groups.
• Access Control. MindTouch Deki lets you set permissions for each page. It uses hierarchical pages so if you set a permission on a page, for example, new pages created under it will automatically inherit its permissions. There’s also a checkbox when setting up the permissions that lets you apply the permissions to all the children pages. Very easy to do and works with LDAP/Active Directory users and groups. MediaWiki on the other hand was not designed for this so the access control extensions you’ll find for it will most likely have flaws.
• WYSIWYG editor. There is an FCKEditor extension for MediaWiki but I find it buggy. The one with MindTouch Deki works really well and you can even copy and paste from Microsoft Word or from another website to it. I also like how the toolbar follows you when you scroll down while editing a page.
• Easily attach files and images. There’s a button to quickly attach files/images to each page. Each page also has a separate section for files and images. You can attach multiple files/images at the same time and MindTouch Deki will automatically detect which are images. The images section gives you a preview of the images. You can also add a description for each file/image.
• Search inside file attachments. By default, MindTouch Deki indexes .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .pdf, .odt, .opt, html, and text files.
• Lots of extensions, here’s a few of them:
  • MySQL – Retrieve data from an external MySQL database as a value, table, list, record, or recordlist and use it in your page. The table is also sortable, by the way. You can also use the retrieved values as inputs to other extensions, like Google maps for example.
  • Flickr
  • Dapper
  • Twitter
  • Windows Live (contacts, map, etc.)
  • Google (search, map, calendar, spreadsheet, etc.) – Requires Google API key.
  • Yahoo!
  • AccuWeather
  • Atom/RSS feeds
  • Media
  • Here’s the entire list: MindTouch Deki Extensions

There are still a lot of things for me to play with, so I’m gonna be pretty busy for a while :).

Here’s the link to download the open source edition:http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/MindTouch_Deki/Download