Puneet Varma (Editor)

BlueSpice for MediaWiki

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Developer(s)
  
Hallo Welt! GmbH

Development status
  
Active

Initial release
  
March 2011 (2011-03)

Written in
  
PHP

BlueSpice for MediaWiki

Original author(s)
  
Markus Glaser, Robert Vogel e.a.

Stable release
  
2.27.0 / 9 November 2016 (2016-11-09)

BlueSpice for MediaWiki (BlueSpice for short) is free wiki software based on MediaWiki and licensed by GNU General Public License. It is especially developed for businesses as an enterprise wiki distribution for MediaWiki and used in over 150 countries.

Contents

Editions

BlueSpice is published in two editions:

  • BlueSpice free is a gratis version for an entry level solution for businesses. It provides functional added value for wiki admins and users.
  • BlueSpice pro is a business-critical solution with comprehensive functionalities, a growing number of available extensions and long-term support – updates and patches are also included.

    • Both editions are software collections, which are based on MediaWiki. The extensions are developed by Hallo Welt! GmbH, its technology partners or independent MediaWiki developers.

    Usage scenarios for BlueSpice

    BlueSpice is mostly used as

  • a central company wiki,
  • a technical documentation platform (e.g. IT help desk or for product specifications)
  • a quality handbook (descriptions of processes and procedures)
  • knowledge management platform (lessons learned, expert debriefing)
  • documentation tool for research and development

    • Functionality

    Some central features of BlueSpice are:

  • Editing: allowing editing without any knowledge of wiki code (WYSIWYG). This makes creating tables, and uploading and inserting pictures easier than with MediaWiki.
  • Search and navigation: An extended search (Apache Lucene) offers improved search functionalities, like faceted search. The search results can further be sorted or filtered by category, namespace, author, data type etc. Any files attached are also searched. It also provides common features like autocomplete and search as you type. The navigation is customizable via dashoard or user sidebars.
  • Administration: Convenient management of users, namespaces, groups, rights and settings.
  • Quality assurance and review tools (workflow tool, reminder e.a.): Pages for instance can be assigned to a reviewer. This allows articles to be reviewed and approved.
  • Meta data and semantic: analyze and work with meta data.

    • Technology

    BlueSpice is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL, Apache/IIS, Tomcat (optional). The editions can be installed on top of an existing MediaWiki installation or as a standalone installation that includes MediaWiki.

    The distribution is a collection of extensions, which can be extended with user-specific features or skins. While every single extension can be deactivated, BlueSpice editions integrate and standardize extensions to improve the user experience and maintenance.

    Licensing

    According to the MediaWiki standard all extensions are published under the GPL 2+ license.

    History

    The German company Hallo Welt! has been working on developing the open source wiki software BlueSpice since 2007. The project was originally initiated by IBM ("bluepedia"), who wanted to deploy MediaWiki but was unable to live with its downsides.

    In 2011, Hallo Welt! decided to publish their wiki as free Open source software. The stable version of BlueSpice for MediaWiki was released July 4, 2011. From this point on, a free download has been available at SourceForge. The first release of BlueSpice was a couple of extensions and is today a complete stand-alone distribution, which has the latest MediaWiki as a core system but offers in the free version more than 50 distinct extensions and a completely different user interface. Following independent sources the BlueSpice free distribution is one of the most popular wiki software for knowledge management in organisations.

    In autumn 2013, Hallo Welt! released the completely reworked version BlueSpice 2. According to the BlueSpice developers this release aims for opening up BlueSpice for freelance developers in the global MediaWiki community, and lays the foundation for many new language versions.

    In 2014, BlueSpice for MediaWiki became a project of Translatewiki.net. In January 2015 the developers announced that they will change to a subscription model.

    Customers and partners

    Desertec, the renewable energy company uses BlueSpice as its collaboration platform. Furthermore, XTREMEtech and HAVI Logistics use BlueSpice as an internal or public wiki.

    References

    BlueSpice for MediaWiki Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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