Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Dr Simon is Head of Division for Information Technology at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Bonn. The reference work with the guidelines for funding, including start-up companies, award regulations and project rules, can be accessed by internal application processors as well as external project organisers. The handbook summarises the supplementary procedural regulations within the administration as well as notes and other information on the processing of project funding and other BMBF projects; however, they only apply in part to the respective project type. The handbook contains approx. 550 internal documents as well as linked legal texts and administrative regulations. The documents and texts can be searched quickly using a full-text search.

Figure 1: Home page of the BMBF wiki based on BlueSpice.

The Confluence Wiki, which had previously been used for this information platform, had been outdated for some time.
‘That’s why we looked around for alternatives and quickly found what we were looking for at Hallo Welt! GmbH,’ says database administrator Rudi Tairow. At an initial presentation, both the management of the company and the staff council agreed to the IT department’s proposal. ‘We were able to get everyone on board without any problems.’

The fact that BlueSpice MediaWiki, which has been in use since the beginning of 2024, is an open source product was a particularly decisive factor. We are now obliged to use such solutions, says Tairow. ‘This makes the whole thing future-proof thanks to the guaranteed support.’ It is also good that Hallo Welt! GmbH is a German company and tickets are processed in German. ‘That makes things a lot less complicated.’ The effort involved in this changeover was ‘relatively manageable’. Hallo Welt! GmbH took over the migration of the data from a corresponding XML file, which was converted and imported for BlueSpice. The user interface was then customised to ensure the familiar working environment despite minor improvements to the display and a new search engine.

Figure 2: Shows the sophisticated semantic free text search of BlueSpice

The responsible department then simply changed and updated the content of individual pages. ‘This is now much easier than with Confluence,’ says Dr Arne Simon. The costs for BlueSpice MediaWiki were also significantly less than half those of the old provider. The release of the in-house reference work for external project organisers has also been simplified. Whereas it used to be necessary to register and then authorise access, their IP addresses are now simply activated for use. ‘This reduces enquiries and saves working time,’ says Tairow.

Figure 3: One of the many subpages of the BMBF with links between articles

Otherwise, not much has changed for users, who generally only have read-only access, with the changeover – apart from a few simplifications. ‘We’ve only improved the technology in the engine room. The actual product has basically remained the same.’ In the medium term, an AI chatbot will be added to the manual to make searching for relevant information easier and more efficient. (sa – 10/2024)