Exploring the BlueSpice wiki tool
Spice Is Nice
Keep your team collaborating with BlueSpice, a wiki tool focused on professional customers.
MediaWiki [1] is the open source, highly collaborative knowledge management tool that runs the world's sixth largest website: Wikipedia. Wiki solutions such as MediaWiki make it easy for large communities to collaborate, offering common access to an information store with built-in editing tools and version control.
MediaWiki is designed to serve a vast community on a global scale, but what if you need to serve a less diverse audience of users in a local or organizational setting? Wikis are excellent tools for business because they support central storage of shared information and eliminate the knowledge bottlenecks that occur when knowledge is shared haphazardly through email and personal connections.
Several open source projects support wiki tools for business environments, including XWiki, DokuWiki, and BlueSpice (for a comparison of these projects, see [2]). BlueSpice, from Hallo Welt!, is a German MediaWiki distribution that focuses on usability in enterprise environments. BlueSpice 4.1 [3], released in early 2022, offers a large set of features. The best way to determine whether a tool such as BlueSpice is right for your company is to set it up and explore it. In this article, we'll show how to set up BlueSpice in a typical enterprise setting.
More on BlueSpice
BlueSpice comes in a free version (BlueSpice free) and a commercial version (BlueSpice pro). BlueSpice free, which is the primary focus for this article, is an extension built on top of MediaWiki. Whereas MediaWiki is very simple and austere (Figure 1), BlueSpice free offers several additional options, along with a more sophisticated look and feel (Figure 2).
Deploying BlueSpice
You have two options for getting BlueSpice up and running. The "classical" way is to set up BlueSpice on a working LAMP stack. To get BlueSpice up and running, you simply extract BlueSpice to the DocumentRoot
directory of your web server, start its built-in configuration agent (in a browser), and enter relevant data (such as the database to use along with the required credentials).
However, if you don't happen to have a working LAMP stack on hand, BlueSpice also offers a Docker image of BlueSpice free 4.1 that contains all the necessary components. As this Docker image comes straight from Hallo Welt! and the image's sources are also publicly available, it's easy to verify what the image does internally, doing away with the latent danger of running a "black box" on your hardware. Preparations for getting BlueSpice up and running in Docker are a bit different from what you usually do in non-Docker environments, but overall, the Docker image should be less work than configuring a working version of BlueSpice on an existing LAMP stack.
Hardware
Although BlueSpice can cause quite a bit of CPU and RAM load, it usually isn't necessary to supply the software with huge amounts of hardware. Dedicating a physical machine will almost always be overkill. Only a huge enterprise with thousands of concurrent users accessing the tool will see BlueSpice consume dozens of CPU cores or hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. The ideal (and normal) deployment scenario is inside of a virtual machine (VM). You can use standard tools such as VMware, Proxmox, or KVM-based virtualization as a VM in one of the hyperscaling public clouds (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Azure, etc.).
However, you should pick a storage device for your BlueSpice VM that is replicated on the infrastructure level. Otherwise, once BlueSpice is up and running, there would be no way to ensure proper high availability (HA) for the service.
For an average-sized BlueSpice setup, a small machine with eight (virtual) CPU cores and 16GB of RAM should be absolutely sufficient. As the amount of stored articles in the wiki grows, RAM needs might increase. Inside the container, BlueSpice uses ElasticSearch for searching and indexing; the more data, the more resources you will need. If you are running BlueSpice inside of a VM, and the VM runs out of resources, just add more virtual resources to the system.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Adds New Deployment Option for Enterprise Linux Platforms
Red Hat has re-imagined enterprise Linux for an AI future with Image Mode.
-
OSJH and LPI Release 2024 Open Source Pros Job Survey Results
See what open source professionals look for in a new role.
-
Proton 9.0-1 Released to Improve Gaming with Steam
The latest release of Proton 9 adds several improvements and fixes an issue that has been problematic for Linux users.
-
So Long Neofetch and Thanks for the Info
Today is a day that every Linux user who enjoys bragging about their system(s) will mourn, as Neofetch has come to an end.
-
Ubuntu 24.04 Comes with a “Flaw"
If you're thinking you might want to upgrade from your current Ubuntu release to the latest, there's something you might want to consider before doing so.
-
Canonical Releases Ubuntu 24.04
After a brief pause because of the XZ vulnerability, Ubuntu 24.04 is now available for install.
-
Linux Servers Targeted by Akira Ransomware
A group of bad actors who have already extorted $42 million have their sights set on the Linux platform.
-
TUXEDO Computers Unveils Linux Laptop Featuring AMD Ryzen CPU
This latest release is the first laptop to include the new CPU from Ryzen and Linux preinstalled.
-
XZ Gets the All-Clear
The back door xz vulnerability has been officially reverted for Fedora 40 and versions 38 and 39 were never affected.
-
Canonical Collaborates with Qualcomm on New Venture
This new joint effort is geared toward bringing Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core to Qualcomm-powered devices.