Hi all,
sorry for jumping on this thread so late, I was kept rather busy with WCA stuff this week...
There's a MediaWiki extension called BlueSpice [1] which I (and others) developed. It's maintained by my company, Hallo Welt!, and it's free as in GPL (available on SourceForge with more than 10000 downloads as of now). This extension is the outcome of 50+ MediaWiki installations in enterprise environments and I think a lot of issues discussed on this thread are covered: WYSIWYG editor, read permissions / compartment, search with facets, just to name a few. Half of our installations run on Windows Servers in production. There's also a demo [2], unfortunately only in German.
The question, then, is how much do these that two items really affect enterprise uptake? Is there a need outside of your organisation?
The top show stoppers we face when it comes to MediaWiki vs. Sharepoint or Confluence are: * lack of guarantee / warranty (which can be overcome by hiring a professional) * lack of read permissions on certain areas ("Compartment"?) * missing WYSIWYG * integration issues (Active Directory, Windows environments) I know that all of these issues are addressed in one or the other MediaWiki extension, but obviously, in public perception, these are not known widely enough. So I am totally happy about the discussion on extension visibility that was lead earlier on this list.
On several occasions, we were asked about a bridge to SharePoint and we did develop a showcase (for MW 1.15...). We never brought it to production, though, as our customers seemed not to need it desperately enough to pay for the final finish.
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BlueSpice [2] http://demo.blue-spice.org
Best, Markus