Case Study:
InnovaKom
Development, installation and support of a DokuWiki-based IMS wiki for more than 30 end customers of a certification consultancy
Customer
InnovaKom GmbH, based in Paderborn, has supported private and public-sector companies on their path to certification since 2001. Its work covers quality, environmental, energy and occupational safety management, from the required processes and documentation through to successful audits. The interdisciplinary team brings together auditors for ISO 9001 and IATF 16949, energy auditors, specialists for ISO 50001 and ISO 14001, and occupational safety experts under ISO 45001. This combination allows InnovaKom to pair tailored, innovative approaches with experience from more than 200 completed projects.
To maintain the documentation required for these certifications at its customers’ companies, InnovaKom provides a preconfigured “IMS wiki” based on DokuWiki. The wiki is a central part of InnovaKom’s service offering and is used by many customers in a wide range of IT environments.
Project
The IMS wiki has to run reliably in very different customer setups: Windows and Linux, IIS and Apache, Active Directory and file server integrations, and often with customer-specific corporate design adjustments. Over the years, this produced a steady stream of new requirements. The base version and installed plugins had to be maintained and adapted to current DokuWiki and PHP versions. Creating a deliverable wiki copy for new customers needed to become more automated. Individual features such as PDF export, diagram editing and content approval also required targeted improvements.
Above all, InnovaKom needed a dependable technical partner to install the wiki systems for end customers, keep them up to date and support them in day-to-day operation. Today, this work covers more than 30 customers, with some systems hosted by CosmoCode and others running on customer infrastructure. InnovaKom was looking for an experienced DokuWiki partner who could handle these tasks over the long term, implement clearly scoped improvements, modernize existing plugins and make suitable results available to the wider community.
Implementation
CosmoCode has supported InnovaKom since 2018 as a long-term partner for the DokuWiki-based IMS wiki. The cooperation combines software development with hands-on technical operation and support for the wiki systems used by InnovaKom’s end customers.
The main focus is CosmoCode’s role as technical partner for those customer wikis. CosmoCode installs IMS wiki instances, performs ongoing updates and provides direct technical support to end customers. Some customers use CosmoCode’s Managed Hosting, while others run the wiki on their own infrastructure. Over the years, more than 30 end customers and their wiki systems have been set up and supported this way, and the number continues to grow.
In parallel, CosmoCode continuously improves the IMS wiki itself. This includes tooling to automatically create preconfigured wiki copies for new customers, as well as ongoing improvements to features such as PDF export and content approval. Diagrams are a central part of this work: the original draw.io plugin developed for InnovaKom was later replaced by CosmoCode’s completely new diagrams plugin, which better matches InnovaKom’s requirements and makes creating and editing diagrams much easier.
To keep the wiki reliable across very different customer environments, CosmoCode also handles regular upgrades, modernization of existing plugins and integration with local IT infrastructure, from Active Directory to corporate design templates. All code is published under the GPL. Where a solution is useful beyond InnovaKom’s specific setup, it is released as an open-source plugin on DokuWiki.org and GitHub.
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