I was looking for a way to ease our company-internal collaboration, and decided to give the Wiki concept a try again. We did this a couple of years ago, using a slightly modified version of Ward Cunningham’s original Wiki code. Then we introduced Lotus Domino, and our Wiki died.

While I like Notes/Domino a lot, its support for building a web of crosslinked documents is very limited. One of its major strengths, though, is replication — a feature that is critical to us, since many of us spend a lot of their time traveling, and being able to create a document that gets replicated later is a very cool thing. So I search around for offline-capable Wiki implementations. Ed Taekema was looking for something similar, Don Park has written about Distributed Wikis, and Bertrand Delacrétaz suggests using a Wiki with CVS backend and synchronize this way.

I finally decided to try out a project called BeeWiki which is hosted on OpenNTF. This is a pretty straight-forward Wiki clone, but it uses Domino as its backend. With this solution, it’s possible to use a Web browser or the Notes client to work with the Wiki contents.

Installation was dead simple, and this looks very promising. Chances are we’ll discover something that will prevent us from sticking with it (a strong tendency here), but we’ll definitely give it a try …