Integrating activeCollab and DokuWiki

Every company’s intranet tends to be a conglomeration of many different tools. Data – if stored at all – distributes along the many different platforms, dependent on who did store it, when has it been stored, and sometimes even which tool is most appropriate for that type of data. Getting information out of such a distributed system is a tedious task.

At CosmoCode, we somehow believe in wikis as a useful technology for storing a company’s resources – it is hardly suprising that we are running a DokuWiki instance as a major part of our intranet. Other components are projektron (German blog post) and activeCollab. While most of a project’s technical information is stored in DokuWiki, the task management – a crucial part of the daily work – happens in activeCollab. This separation artificially limited the usage of a project’s wiki page.

To improve the project pages and aggregate useful data there, I wrote a small activeCollab integration plugin for DokuWiki. To date it does nothing more but allow users to add a list of open activeCollab tickets (and tasks) for a given project to a wiki page. However simple the task was (thanks to the activeCollab API), such aggregations may provide a great help in integrating different tools and providing a common entry point.