Blog

As of 7pm on Jan 21st, the Wiki service has been restored and is now operating normally.

Wikis

The Wiki service will be unavailable on Thursday, January 21st between 6-7pm for a database reconfiguration.

There will be an outage to the Wiki service between 8:00-10:00AM on Saturday, Dec 12th 2009 for server maintenance.

An unscheduled outage to the database server interrupted the Wikis service this morning.  As of 9:45am, all services have been restored. 

The Wikis service will be down on Thursday, Oct 15th from 6:00-7:00pm to deploy the Confluence 3.0.2 security patch.

The Wikis service experienced an unexpected service interruption lasting approximately 3.5 hours, starting from approximately 9:00pm on Saturday, October 10th and ending at 12:30am on Sunday, October 11th.  We regret any inconvenience to our users and we are taking measures to prevent further outages.

We are pleased to be releasing a Confluence 3.0.1 patch on October 7, 2009 to deploy two fixes addressed by Atlassian:

*When moving wiki pages within or between spaces, attachments will now move with those pages
*User identities within Wikis will be simplified, eliminating the likliehood for Space Admins to see duplicate user emails or IDs

Over the course of yesterday, a small group of users with Touchstone Collaboration accounts has been unable to access Wiki spaces of which they were members. This was due to a group handling discrepancy between Touchstone and Moira which we failed to catch during testing.

Please contact the Help Service Desk if any users continue to have space access problems.
To find out more about the login procedure for the MIT Wiki service, please see the Wiki Login via MIT Touchstone page or our video about logging in.

We apologize for this disruption in access to our Collaboration Account users.

This upgrade supports our goal of providing a robust, scalable, and usable wikis service for the MIT community. Improvements include better integration with MIT infrastructure, a more robust rich-text editor, improved support for images, macros and tables, and social features that support discovery and connection with other users.

Training and Demos

Users are invited to attend one hour training sessions in the N42 Demo Center on the following dates/times for Confluence 3.0 demonstrations:

• Wednesday, August 5th, 10:00 am
• Thursday, August 6th, 2:00 pm
• Monday, August 24th, 10:00 am
  
  

What's new and improved:

• Video overview of new features in the Confluence product
• General Confluence feature tour
• How Confluence solves your collaboration problems
• Plugins on the way
  • Office Connector - import and view office documents
  • Widget Connector - embed content from websites
  • Gallery - image gallery and thumbnails
  • Calendar - display various calendars, local and remote
  • Tasklist - to-do list etc.
  • Chart - display graphs of data
  • Gliffy - diagram complex concepts within wiki pages
  • and more ...
• Screenshot tour

MIT Wikis enabled the Gliffy plugin on June 1, 2009.  The new Gliffy plugin gives users the capability to add diagrams to Wiki pages.  For more information, please visit https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/HELP/The+Gliffy+Plugin.

We've disabled the Social Networking (bookmarks) plugin (included in the recent upgrade to Confluence 2.7.3) due to concerns about the behavior of the plugin. We will review a more recent version and determine whether it should be reinstated.

This week we upgraded the server hardware for MIT Wikis. It's a great relief to have made this move, which allows us to be able to offer a quicker and more reliable service. Thanks to all our users for your patience as we worked through the upgrade process.

We've now upgraded MIT Wikis to Confluence version 2.7.3. The new release contains some added functionality and bug fixes.
Most importantly, though, the upgrade includes major improvements to the application's back-end user and group management framework. Space administrators will find a very much improved user search function on the Permissions page, making it much easier to find and add users to their spaces. This improvement is particularly pertinent now that MIT Wikis is using MIT Touchstone Collaboration Accounts for non-MIT users, whose usernames are not as easy to deduce as those of MIT users.
The upgrade has also allowed us to move to a newer back-end java engine, which should help the application to run more efficiently.

This upgrade paves the way for our next major improvement --  a move to a new, more reliable and faster hardware environment -- which we hope to have in place within the next month. Watch this space for updates. 

The MIT Wiki Service is now using MIT Touchstone Collaboration Accounts for authentication of non-MIT 'guest' users. Collaboration Accounts are free, and take just a few minutes to create. A Collaboration Account gives the owner potential access to a growing number of MIT services, including Wikis and the Stellar Course Management system.

Info on:

Creating a Collaboration Account
Logging in using your MIT Touchstone Collaboration Account

If you've recently upgraded Firefox, you may be receiving multiple popups regarding certificates. This is due to a change in Firefox's default behavior.
We've modified server settings to compensate, but you still may want to disable the certificate-related popups by modifying your Firefox preferences:
On a Mac:
go to Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Encryption
On Windows:
go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Encryption
..then change from 'Ask me every time' to 'Select one automatically'