ClearWiki is a new entry to the integrated wiki and blog (bliki) market. It is targeted at small to medium business, project and educational teams and has a feature set, which reflects this. You can start off with a free package and add features in a very flexible manner as your project grows. It is not meant for general public display, so no fancy themes but just a good straight forward easy to use interface.
ClearWiki provider statement
” ClearWiki is feature rich, yet extremely intuitive and easy to use. Organize your information logically and easily.
Your employees don’t need to learn a special wiki language.”
Start with a free ClearWiki and extend as your needs change
ClearWiki has a free hosted option, which provides unlimited wiki and blog pages for up to 10 users and 512Mb of file storage. Adverts are displayed on the pages but you can remove these for $7.95 per month.
You can upgrade users or storage or add SSL encryption or refined access control for additional costs.
- Extra users: $1 per user per month (min purchase 10 extra users)
- Extra storage: $10 per Gb per month (min purchase 2Gb)
- Full SSL Encryption: $50 per month
- Access Control Lists: $50 per month
Domain names
You choose a sub-domain name: YourUserName.clearwiki.com
Content supported
ClearWiki copes well with text and images and does have built in todo lists. Text and background can be coloured.
The multiple blog function allows threaded discussion. You can attach images and files.
Although ClearWiki does not support a range of multimedia content you can access the xhtml for your pages. This is unlikely to be a problem considering it is aimed at business use.
Search Engine Optimisation is not a priority on ClearWiki
Search engine optimisation is not a concern for ClearWiki as it is intended for private use.
ClearWiki is easy to use
Good looks do not seem to count at ClearWiki but it is well laid out and easy to use. You can be alerted to changes by RSS or email and when you arrive on the home page there is a good recent activity list. You can see who made changes to what and revert back to early versions if that is what is needed. The blog function makes discussion and commenting straight forward.
Navigation is good. There is a good search function, which supports complex queries and searches attached files such as PDF, MS Office or OpenOffice files as well as the wiki, blog or other pages on your site. You can layout your site in a hierarchical structure, which then can be displayed on a site map and you can tag pages (they call tags, labels - not sure why, even the tag list is called a label list).
Editing ClearWiki
ClearWiki uses the FCKeditor, which is one of the best online WYSIWYG editors. Selecting ‘Control + h’ switches you into xhtml mode. If the editor decides the code you write is not valid xhtml it will have a try at selecting it, which is a bit of a pain. I did not find a way of getting to the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) so the utility of xhtml access is limited.
ClearWiki language options
ClearWiki has a visual universal keyboard which copes with many languages and can write right to left. Help is only available in English.
Paid versions allow finely grained permissions.
ClearWiki is always private and cannot be accessed by the public. In the free version, people you invite have access to all pages. If you pay $50 per month, you can grant permissions to access individual pages or groups of pages to either individual members or selected member groups.
ClearWiki Security
ClearWiki has good security options from your additional edit to the final product.
Your drafts autosave as you are editing so that if you lose your internet connection you do not lose your work. All versions of pages are kept, so it is easy to revert to a previous version if a needed. You can even restore deleted pages from the recycle bin.
The ability to back up all your site to zip files stored on your local machine should help you feel you are not giving up control of your data.
As it is a private wiki, vandals and spammers are easily excluded.
If you need it you can upgrade to https encryption.
ClearWiki has a clear privacy policy.
ClearWiki Management
ClearWiki only came out of beta in june 2007 so is pretty much a new kid on the block and so it is hard to form an opinion on how responsive or stable the company is going to be. Although when you read their blog you get the impression that they are enthusiastic and responsive to user needs.
Help and support for ClearWiki
Help is by a limited list of FAQs. There are a few omissions, for example; it took me a little while to find out how to upload images. However once I looked in the right place it was easy.
There is as yet no evidence of a user community but I feel sure that a user forum will not be long appearing.
ClearWiki does seem to have meet the needs of small to medium business, project or educational teams who want to collaborate online. The combined wiki, blog, knowledge management system is flexible and easy to use. It is easy to Sign up for a free option try it out and stay with it if it suits your needs.
I have tabulated ClearWikis features on the following page.
Tagged with: Bliki • Clearwiki • Review • Wiki
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One Comment
Clearwiki is very intuitive and easy to use. We implemented 35 users with nothing more than a couple of introductory meetings. The interface is clean and all options and features are on every page, very few menus to navigate.
They have released several updates and are very responsive to feedback.
Companies with lean overhead could profit tremendously.
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ClearWiki helps you to organize your information logically and easily for small and medium sized businesses. Your employees don’t need to learn a special wiki l…