The newest version of Open Office being 2.3.1 has a new capability that allows you to create an Open Document and then export that document into the popular MediaWiki syntax to help in the creation of wiki documents. For people familiar with using MediaWiki open source wiki platform this is most likely not a big deal. But as many are well aware of, training a non technical person how to use a MediaWiki is close to impossible. I have long discussed the importance of using a wiki within business organizations for documentation purposes. But if it takes forever to train your people on how to use that wiki than you can just forget about it.

MediaWiki due to it’s high flexibility and level of complication has the ability to do many things. You can become extremely creative with MediaWiki as a content management system. Systems like Wikipedia.org are just the beginning of what MediaWiki can and will do in the future. Now it can be easier to use this system for the end user which in and of itself presents thousands of new opportunities.

Can Microsoft Office do this? Not that I have seen. This is the type of feature that benefits Open Office and gives them the better hand. Due to MS Office being so proprietary it makes it harder for them to keep up with the latest trends like MediaWiki.

Practical Use: Set up a MediaWiki Installation for your small business and start documenting all of your process and procedures as a business. This will help you streamline many of your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks in order for your company to succeed. Write up your document using Open Office then use the export/filter tool which will put your document into Wiki language. Copy and paste that into your MediaWiki page and you are good to go. Get other people in your organization to document some of these things for you using Open Office. You can even take care of the exporting for them.

I took the paragraph above and added a little formatting to it, then pasted it into an Open Office document. Then I clicked File, then Export, gave the file a name and selected MediaWiki in the dropdown for what filetype to save it as. It gave me this:

”’This is a test”’
”’Practical Use:”’ Set up a MediaWiki Installation for your small business and start documenting all of your process and procedures as a business. ”’This will help you streamline many of your daily,”’ weekly, and monthly tasks in order for your company to succeed. Write up your document using Open Office then use the export/filter tool which will put your document into Wiki language. Copy and paste that into your MediaWiki page and you are good to go. Get other people in your organization to document some of these things for you using Open Office. ”You can even take care of the exporting for them.”
[http://chasesagum.com/ Http://chasesagum.com]

As you can see it gave the bold text the quotes, and it put brackets and formatted the hyperlink both to work perfectly with your mediawiki install. Perfectly done.