Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the conscious decision to stay as close to the core MediaWiki distribution
as possible to limit our exposure to maintenance and support costs/
overheads. This has meant we have:
■
never redeveloped any of the codebase for the MediaWiki application
itself nor any third-party extensions used. This way the upgrade path
for our installation of MediaWiki is pain-free and low effort as we can
deploy new versions without the need to reapply company specifi c
customisations;
■
been conservative in our adoption of third-party extensions, again to
limit the amount of effort required for our upgrade path and ongoing
support;
■
tried to limit any third-party extensions installed to being from only
those used on the Wikipedia family of web sites, maintained by the
same group of developers of the core system itself. This should mean
that the development of these extensions is more likely to be in sync
with the main MediaWiki software. This should negate the need for
revision of extension code by internal developers whenever a new
version of MediaWiki is issued.
As a result of adopting these principles, we have faced no software issues
or outages, low to non-existent support and maintenance costs, and a set
of happy and very satisfi ed users. Our experience confi rms MediaWiki as
a powerful piece of software that can be applied to many different
knowledge-sharing and collaboration scenarios. It boasts features that
facilitate connections to people, knowledge and information that do not
exist in many other forms of collaboration and content management
software. Couple this with the large and highly active support/
development community and it can readily be seen that MediaWiki is an
example of a FLOSS solution that can be readily deployed into production
with minimal risk.
13.2.7 Shared Service phase
In many respects the challenges and objectives for this fi nal phase are
common to all application deployments within large organisations. Here
we see a transition of responsibility from the team that developed/
implemented a solution over to the sustain/support team. Typically, in
large organisations, this involves two groups; those delivering back-end
support and those providing direct end-user support (i.e. a 'helpdesk').
The former requires the technical details about the implementation; which
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