SunStar Systems' Orion

Adopting Orion immediately reduces your risk of a major security incident; and the peace of mind delivered matters more to your board of directors than an expensive ransomware insurance policy you never need to file a claim against.

Setting aside the security advantages, a fundamental flaw of wiki-like products other than Orion is that they fail to provide coherent integrations/interfaces for incorporation and periodic maintenance of externally-generated data file formats. However, by focusing on a handful of industry standard text/source document/data formats, even your most intricate data-generated tables, graphs, charts, maps, and architectural diagrams are fully searchable and AI translatable in any of Orion’s supported natural languages.

For example, you will see no more lost productivity for staff trying to acquire periodically updated, critically confidential infosec cloud asset configuration details locked in an obscurely tagged, externally generated data table somewhere in your present wiki, and in frustration reaching out to teammates who also don’t recall where it is. Which naturally escalates the evolving time sink to managers; and so it goes. Until someone remembers, but because the table is huge and they just want the contents of one element in a single row, so they have to fetch it with a browser and eyeball scan it manually. Then repeat the process whenever they discover that the infosec data is next updated^HTML5.

Since Orion searches version-controlled sources instead of ephemerally built pages, your staff will efficiently locate the true permalink originals of the materials they seek- not confusingly amass artificially elevated hits buried in a dozen different peripheral copies of the sought-after information.

That externally generated infosec table gets incorporated into your Orion wiki as a searchable CSV file attached to an underlying markdown document, which otherwise renders it at build time into an embedded HTML5 table.

They want to be notified when that attached CSV is altered? Simply subscribe to the CSV file! Upon notification during their next visit to the wiki (and not via email spam), they can skip the embedded HTML5 rendered markdown table and instead directly fetch exactly what they need from Orion’s JSON build of the CSV attachment using standard CLI tools like curl and jq.

Hooking your company’s Agentic AI solution into your team’s wiki workflow doesn’t get any easier or less expensive than with Orion.

Timeliness, convenience, accuracy, and precision, in the endless persuit of the current single source of truth, function as major productivity enablers for your most time-constrained employees. The likely consequences of not having these Orion-only features is that your Platform Engineers will be forced to waste $10-100K annually on makework by creating, building, documenting, and supporting miniature, internal websites with REST-based interfaces to these shared datasets, as augmentation workarounds for your wiki vendor’s limited searchable and retrievable data integration feature set.

Contrarily, Orion will surface your once-lost, externally generated infosec details on demand, and render them in a manner amenable to the automatable web-enabled/AI agents that your talent prefers. With unparalleled alacrity and reliability. Want to perfect your search by hand tuning to taste, until you ultimately prefer JSON to HTML5 in your results? Again, Orion delivers (same URL, different Accept header.)^refinements

In other words, information retrieval is a fundamentally different problem domain than content creation/modification, but the CRUD-based wiki apps from our competitors do not make this distinction in a meaningful way. Additionally, with Orion’s Jamstack design, taxonomies aren’t tacked on as an unmanageable, generic/emergent dynamically generated afterthought culled from overtaxed SQL tables. Instead, they are informed with careful structural planning and consistently enforced, heirarchical organization by experienced information architects across your team and ours^sprawl.

Next, content curation tooling is an essential feature of Orion, not an opportunity to upsell. Our per-wiki facts database is an industry first — handy for things like managing consistent name branding or related software artifact metadata across the entire website with a 1-line edit to a YAML file.

So instead of the inevitable, entropic link rot innate to other wiki products, you get internal/external link validation at page modification time during a comprehensive, MIME-type based, pre-commit linting pass by Orion’s CMS editor. We also provide every customer with a reporting infrastructure to catch stale internal/external links on demand, even when the pages involved haven’t been altered in months. Diagrams are just as easy to keep in sync with evolving alterations to the markdown prose, because with Orion’s mermaid integration, the diagram sources are embedded in the page’s prose itself. Painless recursive search / replace to repair the accumulated cruft is built into the PCRE search engine in the CMS.

With Orion, your wiki is no longer of deteriorating utility for your teams; but becomes a rewarding resource for them to use and enhance. Also, you don’t need to be a wiki administrator to use these tools — almost anyone can voluntarily participate in the grooming activities, or perhaps be organizationally delegated to perform this duty as team leads.

Measurable ROI growth across your organization is a follow-on, continuous blooming effect of the aggregate gardening and caretaking abilities unique to our wiki platform.

Moreover, as your site evolves to the point where files or folders need to be relocated or deleted, Orion not only tracks location moves by deploying automated HTTP redirects from the original locations to the new targets, but also continues to enshrine into rule the existing ACLs on the original locations in perpetuity. This ensures your confidential content remains protected against historical searches from unauthorized users in the system who might otherwise have direct access to Orion’s version control interfaces to your wiki’s sources.

Ever seen a system that can reliably integrate filtered content/data across independent source files? Orion can, with full suppport for the cyclic cross-dependencies and authorization controls on each source file. There’s simply no way to accidentally (or maliciously) launder access-controlled content through its content integration functionality, and there’s no way for content/data in such files to be modified without those modifications percolating down to induce concurrent builds of their dependent files^application.

Of course none of this is possible with products like Notion because it is impossible to reseed an existing generated database with an updated external file import; you have to delete and recreate the entire database (or possibly use third party tooling). By deleting the original database, you also destroy all the wiki links and associated user watch notification lists for it. “Unpleasant” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Besides, YAML/JSON aren’t even supported data ingestion formats in Notion (or Confluence)! If you can’t shoehorn externally generated tree-like data into a CSV table, all you have left are bare page blocks with which you can waste more time better spent mastering our Orion platform.

There’s nobody else in the industry who has put this much refinement into every aspect of their wiki product as a total package.

Futhermore, Orion scales with you as you grow, especially at the enterprise level. The $0 per seat licensing and unlimited number of websites opens up new opportunities for controlled knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams, partners, websites, and even the entire planet with our federated platform! We know that for most clients, just a tiny portion of those seat licenses would be used to actually edit pages, but they can use an unlimited number of “associated” read-only accounts in their wikis to share protected information with over the internet. Accounts that need not have any access to the Orion CMS proper- a cost-saving feature unique to Orion as the only corporation-backed Enterprise Jamstack Wiki.

As your personnel’s corporate status evolves over time, Orion makes it easy for wiki administrators to deal with the wiki reauthorizations involved. Doing a mass search and replace on every explicit ACL setting on the site that’s tied to an ex-employee’s account is as trivially automatable as onboarding a new staffer or upgrading an existing one by dropping them into the appropriate version-control authorization groups that your team designed^ownership.

With other market solutions, without a premium plan you are on your own.

Finally, we tailor every installation to your specific requirements, and are always available for consultation and professional coaching to ensure you maximize returns on your investment in our products and services. Your team has a partner in us in terms of ensuring you see the anticipated productivity gains and customer satisfaction associated with Orion — designed for robust, verified, collaborative knowledge creation/curation; and easy, comprehensive, precision information retrieval thereof.

Footnotes

HTML5. (True story!) To add insult to injury, it turns out your existing wiki only renders page contents as an implicit javascript-based web browser application, instead of Orion’s explicit standards-compliant HTML5 document. This implies, among other things, that even if your wiki’s search engine surfaces the tables you need, you can’t directly access those tables as agentic downloadable wiki content unless the infosec team goes through the trouble of consistently deleting and re-exporting the table (as a CSV attachment) whenever the data is updated.

refinements. Didn’t immediately find what you were looking for in Orion’s search hits? Refine your current search with a search filter on the material you did locate; repeat if necessary. Or click on a suggested associated keyword generated from the located material to shift your seach in an adjacent direction. Or expand the scope of your search to a higher level in the list of directory breadcrumbs at the upper end of the page. Or switch to a PCRE regex search instead of the Lucene natural-language-stemmed bareword match popularized by Google in its formative years.

Does your current solution offer your staff this level of exploratory search capability? Definitely not if it’s Confluence or Notion.

application. Applying this technology to the infosec table situation: your team could use it to integrate and filter the Orion-pemalinked CSV attachment into its own separate wiki page, and Orion will ensure the content on that separate page is updated whenever the permalinked infosec table is, not just when the wiki page is edited by hand. As is the case with other wiki solutions.

sprawl. Orion has many tools for controlling wiki sprawl; from building dynamic topological constraints into the site-wide ACLs, to simply supporting document archival — which is a document Status setting that signals to Orion that the page should be elided from its dependency management graph; effectively unlinking it from all document indexes and cross-references, and instructing Orion to ignore it in CMS directory listings, while preserving the file as a searchable permalink and archiving a copy of it to a corresponding current year/month timestamped location elsewhere on the wiki.

ownership. In fact, there is no formal concept of page ownership in the system. Orion’s version control simply tracks the per-user-authorized changesets of staff at the time of the user-committed changes, lending to a more natural, collegial corporate acculturation towards the combined work product of a wiki than in any other similar system. Locking down pages to individual user accounts/“authors” is anathema to the collaborative ideals of wikis, but it is certainly possible moving forward with explicit ACL header assignments on the pages involved.