Most wikis can be delivered to your company in three formats: on-premise (you install the software on your machines and manage it), hosted (software as a service (SaaS), where the vendors store all the data on their servers), or as an appliance, which is a hybrid model between the first two options.

According to Yehuda, many larger enterprises choose to go with on-premise installs of wikis, especially if their industry has strict requirements around what type of proprietary data (if any) can be stored outside their company's server farms.

The hosted SaaS model can be attractive for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) with leaner IT departments that have limited resources and can't take on the burden of managing more servers and software. In addition, SaaS is adopted sometimes within large enterprises by line of business departments who are tired of waiting for IT to provide them with a wiki or other collaborative technologies.

The third option, a wiki appliance, has also gained some popularity, Yehuda says. An appliance is what software gurus (and the tech jargon they speak) would call a "plug and play" offering. In other words, a company can plug the wiki appliance into their existing server environment, and after some minor install work by the vendor, the wiki is up and going, hosted in their current server farm.

Yehuda says the appliance also solves two complicated problems faced by companies interested in wikis. On one hand, many companies don't want to go through the complexity of installing the software themselves (making a full on-premise install unattractive), but they also have strict rules around storing data externally (thus eliminating SaaS as a viable option). An appliance "helps address those two problems," Yehuda says, by providing the in-house storage but avoiding the headache of the install.