BlueSpice free

BlueSpice Icon (2011)

BlueSpice is a free Open Source Enterprise Wiki. It is based on the Wikipedia-Software MediaWiki and extends this with lots of features for quality management, process support, administration, editing and security. The software is written in PHP and compatible for Windows and Linux systems. BlueSpice is published under the GPL v3 license and therefore free of charge.

Field of application

In the first instance, BlueSpice and the BlueSpice software packages have been developed for using a wiki in the intranet. The solution is primarily used for online documentations. But also lots of web projects choose BlueSpice.

Important features at a glance

Professional editing

• Visual editor (WYSIWYG) for editing, formatting and creating tables without wiki code.
• Comfortable inserting of images, files, links and categories, wiki commands, wiki tags and magic words.

Navigation and Search

• Search engine Elasticsearch realizes fast search in titles, full text, categories, namespaces and attached files (Office, PDF) and enables filtering of results by facets.
• Customizable navigation and menus for foldable and unfoldable main navigation, personal page navigation, top menu and flyout menu with individually assignable widgets and tools.
• Similar articles lead you to topic-relevant articles.
• Tag clouds can be automatically created in the Wiki and displayed on Wiki pages.
• User Dashboard can be equipped with portlets - e.g. for statistics, responsibilities, the most visited pages, an RSS- ticker, etc. - and can also be used for other purposes. - These can be arranged by Drag & Drop.

Process support

• Checkboxes and checklists for tasks and queries.
• Create page templates for a consistent content structure.
• Category overview in tree structure with display of all upper and sub categories of the wiki.
• Catalog images and files and thus also structure them them thematically. These are listed as assigned media in the category article.
• Create image maps and link individual areas of images with them.
• PDF export of individual wiki pages in best quality.

Quality Management

• Status bar, author and reader information give information about the article (e.g. last change, which category etc.) and shows the authors and readers of the article with picture.
• Notifications inform directly in the Wiki about important wiki internal processes. You define what you want to be notified about.
• Mail notifications for creating, editing, deleting and moving as well as for new user registrations are sent on request (configurable).
• Display of the latest changes on wiki pages, can also be built into widgets or menus.
• Statistics and diagrams about different actions with filter option can be output as graphics and exported as .svg or .png.
• Content quality assurance by the possibility to define a professional contact person for content.

Administration

• User and rights management: Create users with passwords and assign corresponding rights. Organize users into groups and assign group rights.
• You can easily define access rights for single pages using a MagicWord.
• Namespacemanager: Manage your namespaces and define areas in the wiki. Separate read and write permissions can be assigned for each namespace.
• Extended user settings for user data, search settings, watch lists, etc.
• LDAP connection: authentication via Active Directory, for example.
• Security for images and documents for your uploaded files. These can no longer be found via the search engine and are only accessible with the appropriate authorization.
• Admin Dashboard offers portlets for statistics, frequent search entries, mostly edited pages, etc., which can be individually compiled and arranged by drag & drop.
• Define design for single namespaces directly in the Wiki (CSS).

Communication and Collaboration

• Who is online? With BlueSpice you get the answer to this question at a glance, because it shows you the active users.
• Automatically generated avatar images for all users, if no own images want to be uploaded.
• Create quiz with multiple-choice questions.

Functionality

The BlueSpice extensions expand the functionality of MediaWiki - but MediaWiki remains without any changes to guarantee the compatibilitiy for updates and upgrades.

System requirements

The system requirements can be found on our helpdesk: View the system requirements here

About the software

Idea and history

BlueSpice is a result of multiple MediaWiki projects. The starting point was the development of a company-wide wiki for IBM Germany in 2007. This project, called "bluepedia", was initialized by Gunter Dueck. The supplementary software components were first distributed under the name HalloWiki Sunrise. In 2010, the Hallo Welt! - Medienwerkstatt GmbH decided to publish the free wiki solution with the new name BlueSpice for MediaWiki.

Business model

The project finances itself from services like installation, support, customization, etc. as well as from distributing additional modules and the subscription of BlueSpice pro. In addition to that, Hallo Welt! GmbH coaches project customers. Whith those, highly customized and very indiviual wikis have been implemented.