Coincidentally, also in Berlin, we use Discourse at an enterprise level for a German automotive company; however, it was not adopted for the wiki. This was largely due to two things:
- Internal politics that were incredibly frustrating and humiliating.
- The Discourse Docs Plugin didn’t quite meeting our needs in 2019 - However the current version does
Discourse at an enterprise level as a wiki is extremely viable, but Confluence has this document hierarchy view on the left that management simply couldn’t let go of(see image below). The outcome was that they decided XWiki would be used as a wiki library, and Discourse would be used for peer-to-peer support, discussions, and questions.
Then, more than 12 months were spent failing to agree on how their tree hierarchy should be organized. The answer of course, is that data is complex and the tree structure really isn’t the best choice for the data we were working with. Ultimately, that went in favour of Discourse where we stuck to the recommended tag based organising, leant on search, and encouraged users to use plenty of hyperlinks.
An important part of this story is that we started in 2019, and the Discourse Knowledge Explorer changed in significant ways after these decisions were made. I believe it is now Discourse Doc Categories, which aligns far more with what we had envisioned and needed at the time.
But really it was the politics at enterprise level that made this hard. You will often get departments and decision-makers who act in their best interests rather than the company’s. We had aligned with the department that ultimately pushed xwiki, and had written agreement that Discourse would be the platform. 12 months later they announced out of nowhere, to the entire company that xwiki would be the new platform. What followed was 12 months of confused users, and incredibly difficult alignment talks that left me wondering if the juice was worth the squeeze. I’ll always maintain that it was, but I was definitely paying a large price personally for fighting these things, and consistently swimming against the tide.
I guess my key takeaway here is that at enterprise level, Discourse is a fantastic wiki tool - especially in software and technical fields. Further, in the right company culture it is a game changer.
The bigger problem in my experience was always the insane amount of politics required to establish the platform.