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Wiki is in Ward's original description: The simplest online database that could possibly work.

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

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Historical Note. The first ever wiki site was created for the Portland Pattern Repository in 1995. That site now hosts tens of thousands of pages.

A Portal CMS is a CMS that is built to serve as a news aggregator or community based system. Portals tend to focus on posting news stories, with automatic linking from introductory text to full stories. Most allow for readers to rank and comment on the stories they read, and make provisions for non-administrators to post items of interest.

Groupware application is typically a system that is setup for the purpose of sharing project-related work and information. Some of the basic characteristics of a groupware application include an event calendar to share key deliverable dates, group mailboxes to distribute communications, a file repository to exchanges documents, and a forum or chat area for interactive discussions. Groupware applications are especially useful in environments where team members are not centrally located and need to have a place to exchange ideas and project commitments.

A Blog is short for Web-Log. Early web logs were simply online journals where people posted their thoughts, observations and links to pages of interest. As blogging (v. posting to a blog) has taken off, recent blog systems have absorbed some portal featires such as reader comments, rankings and so on.

The short answer - a CMS is a Content Management System.

The long answer - a CMS is a system that seperates the content of a web site (the text, images, and so on) from the framework of linking pages together and controlling how the pages appear. In most cases, this is done to make a site easier to maintain than would be the case if it was built exclusively out of hard-coded html pages. At least, that is the goal.

The short answer - a DMS is a Document Management System.

The long answer - a DMS is a system that seperates the content from the web site.

Content in this case can be a PDF file, a Word file, Excel, and any other native format. The system is a container for these documents.

The benefits include being able to retrieve these documents easily and without losing its original format. More sophisticated systems allow for fulltext searches, cataloging by topic or interest, and access controlled by user and group permissions.

KMS is a Knowledge Management System.

KMS can be used across R&D programs to (for example):

• Promote controlled sharing of a company's knowledge related to biological and chemical entities.
• Make knowledge persistent and durable in light of organizational and personnel changes.
• Support the tracking of intellectual property, especially for organizations engaged in multiple collaborations.
• Promote better management and decision-making by providing information across projects in a consistent way in order to measure progress.