BlueSpice free

BlueSpice is a free open source enterprise wiki. It is based on the Wikipedia software MediaWiki and extends it with numerous functions in the area of quality assurance, process support, administration, editing and security. The software is programmed in PHP and can be run on Windows and Linux systems. BlueSpice was released under the GPL v3 license and is thus available for free.

This trial version is run with the more comprehensive version BlueSpice pro. BlueSpice free is a decoupling with a smaller range of functions.

Applications

BlueSpice and BlueSpice software packages were initially developed for wikis on the intranet. The solution is used mainly for all types of online documentation and quality management. But many web projects also use BlueSpice.

Important functions at a glance

Professional editing

• Visual editor (WYSIWYG) for editing, formatting and creating tables without Wikicode.
• Comfortable inserting of images, files, links, and categories, wiki commands, wiki tags, and magic words.

Navigation and search

• Search engine Elasticsearch provides a fast search in titles, full text, categories, namespaces and attached files (Office, PDF) and allows the filtering of results by facets.
• Customizable navigation and menus with a show/hide main navigation, personal page navigation, top menu and flyout menu with customizable widgets and tools.
• Similar articles guide you to contributions relevant to a topic.
• Tag Clouds can be automatically created in the wiki and displayed on wiki pages.
• User Dashboard can be organized individually with portlets - e.g. for statistics, responsibilities, the most visited pages, an RSS ticker, etc. These elements can be arranged by drag & drop functionality.

Process support

• Checkboxes and checkbox lists for tasks and queries.
• 'Creation of Page Templates' for a consistent content structure.
• Category overview in a tree structure with display of all parent categories and sub-categories of the wiki.
• Catalog images and files and thus organize them thematically. The category article lists these as related media.
• Create image maps to link individual areas of images.
• PDF export of individual wiki pages in the highest quality.

Quality Management

• Status bar, information about authors and readers provide details about the article (e.g., last change, associated category, etc.) and displays the authors and readers of the article with their profile image.
• Notifications provide updates directly in the wiki about important wiki-internal events. You define what notices you want to receive.
• Mail notifications are optionally sent when someone creates, edits, deletes or moves content or after new user registrations (configurable).
• View of recent changes on wiki pages. This can also be built into widgets or menus.
• Statistics and Diagrams with output as a graphic via various actions with filter option. Export formats are .svg or .png.
• Content quality assurance by assigning a designated contact person for content.

Administration

• User and rights management: Create users with passwords and assign appropriate rights. Organize users into groups and assign group rights.
  • Single page access permissions can be easily defined using a MagicWord.
• Namespacemanager: Manage your namespaces to specify areas in the wiki. You can assign separate read and write permissions for each namespace.
• Advanced user settings for user data, search settings, watch lists etc.
• LDAP connection: authentication via Active Directory, for example.
• Security for images and documents for your uploaded files. These can no longer be found via the search engine and are only accessible with appropriate authorization.
• Admin Dashboard provides portlets for statistics, frequent searches, most edited pages, etc., which can be customized and arranged via drag & drop functionality.
• Design for individual namespaces directly in the wiki (CSS).

Communication und Collaboration

• Who is online? You get the answer at a glance, because because BlueSpice shows you the active users.
• Automatically generated avatar images for all users, if you do not want to upload your own images.
• Quiz functionality with multiple-choice questions.

Versions

Name	Version	Publishing Date	Notable Changes
BlueSpice 1	basic	November 17, 2010
	1.0.1	September 07, 2011
	1.1	March 15, 2012	Performance improvements, postgreSQL and Oracle database support
	1.20.0	December 21, 2012
	1.20.1	January 17, 2013
	1.21.0	June 21, 2013
BlueSpice 2	2.22.0	November 27, 2013	Completely revised interface, revised PermissionManager and UserManager, new internationalization framework, FlexiSkin, Dashboards, Notifications extension, StateBar (with "similar pages")
	2.22.1	February 13, 2014
	2.22.2	May 8, 2014
	2.23.0	Dezember 9, 2014	Integrated package installer for MediaWiki and BlueSpice, MobileFrontend support, interface refresh, memcached caching support, translation into more than 40 languages, redesigned localization, context menus
	2.23.1	June 25, 2015
	2.23.2	November 30, 2015	Improved integration of Semantic MediaWiki and BlueSpice, compatibility with the MediaWiki VisualEditor
	2.23.3	May 31, 2016
	2.27.0	November 9, 2016	New funcitons: PageAssignments, Showtime, ReadConfirmation, and more Full compatibility with MediaWiki 1.27.
	2.27.1	April 6, 2017	Extended file list, category manager, tracking of reviews, reviews using semantic metadata, and more
	2.27.2	July 20, 2017	Revised visual editor, template insertion wizard, filter for all special pages, revised permission manager with new mouse-over function, daily or weekly summary notifications, signature insertion, integration and visualization of dynamic maps, and more.
	2.27.3	April 18, 2018	Patch release
BlueSpice 3	3.0	October 17, 2018	Major release: Addition of new activity, communication and interaction functions (Timeline), conversion of the search engine to ElasticSearch, introduction of a fully-responsive skin "Calumma" to support mobile view and touch interactions, introduction of "Grafical List" as a new interface element to improve usability, migration to MediaWiki VisualEditor, role-based permissions to simplify rights configuration, revision of authentication stacks (LDAP and SAML).

Functionality

The BlueSpice extensions are complementary to MediaWiki, but MediaWiki itself will not be changed to ensure that upgrades are supported.

Technical requirements

The system requirements are always up to date in our Helpdesk: Requirements System Requirements in the BlueSpice Helpdesk

About the project

Idea and history

BlueSpice is the result of a variety of MediaWiki projects. The starting point was the development of a company-wide wiki for IBM Germany in 2007. The project with the name bluepedia was initiated by Gunter Dueck. The supplementary software components were initially distributed under the name HalloWiki Sunrise. In 2010, the Hello World! media workshop decided to publish their solution under the new name BlueSpice for MediaWiki as free software.

Business model

The project is financed by services (installation, support, adaptation, support, training etc.) as well as the subscription of BlueSpice pro. In addition, Hallo Welt! GmbH serves project customers. Together with our customers, we implement highly customized wiki solutions.