MY organization is thinking (at last) of providing a WIKI for it’s employees. With a few colleagues we are testing a few of the Open Source WIKIs available.
This is made easier through the wikimatrix but in the end they all have to be installed and prepared for testing and that takes computers, time and effort.
The shortlist we have to test is as follows:
I have my own ideas as to the merits of each of these tools but before I engage in a long discussion do you have any ideas on the subject?
on Mar 6th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Disclaimer: I work with XWiki
Hi Graham,
since I work for XWiki my comment will obviously be oriented, but you may be interested in reading it though.
XWiki was written from scratch by a guy who discovered corporate wikis through TWiki and enjoyed them so much that he decided to write his own. The main thing he felt was missing with TWiki was the ability to use it as a base for applicaiton building, hence XWiki.
This means that XWiki is using a class / object model that lets developers build their own apps on top of it easily (if you are a developer ;-). Its aim was to be at the same time flexible, powerful and easy to integrate within a company (with features such as LDAP integration…)
Since XWiki has been a solo project for some time when it was started, it was a bit rough for end used since it was clearly focused on the quality of the backend. For 6 months now the Open-Source community has been growing around XWiki (with Vincent Massol from Maven joining us). The “rough edges” heritage is still present but the work done on the 1.0 release (which should be out be fore the end of March) has managed to get rid of plenty of bugs, improving the WYSIWYG editor and making the software much more useable overall.
Obviously, you will not find as many instances of XWiki as the ubiquitous MediaWiki and TWiki. These are pretty good softwares, TWiki maybe most fitted to the enterprise context since this is what it was built for while MediaWiki, though tweaked in various ways, has still issues as regards its look and features within enterprises.
I thought it would be interesting for you to be aware of what XWiki was originally meant for since it may be a feature you are looking after thgouh you do not know it yet. Being able to create generic templates for pages (say, a default invoice or FAQ page) in minutes can be quite useful in a company. And there is the programming languages (Velocity, Groovy, html, css, JavaScript…) you can use directly within the wiki too…
Hope this is still readable though the XWiki bias is more than huge. Tell me if I break the way you understand the “nétiquette”
Guillaume
PS: Thanks for having given XWiki a try!
on Mar 6th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
No, No, please retain your way of commenting and by the way that was really an excellent comment.
I agree with most of what you say although by agreeing it comforts my thoughts on the question.
My own thoughts on the matter are that the first thing we need to do is to pick a WIKI and to use it. For me WIKIs should privilege content over form and are an excellent way to throw ideas together and compose “documents” as a group. For my organization to spend too much time in testing and choosing is already a mistake.
The problem with “rich” WIKIS in my mind is that they turn attention away from content and focus either on format or on replacing organizational applications that the developers haven’t had the time to roll out yet. You only have to witness the plethora of Applications made in MSAccess that need to be migrated from version to version to convince yourself.
Thus the richness of XWIKI while laudable is also a danger if you just want content.
I am pleased to hear that some of the roughness has been ironed out and I look forward to discovering version 1.0 (Now would be a *very* good moment to give it a whirl given the tests we are undertaking).
By the way we are in contact with your colleagues, is the identity of my organization obscure?? and they seem a fine bunch of very competent people.
As for the other two WIKIs I am personally drawn to Mediawiki for it’s categorization capabilities as we have a need for Organizational Dictionaries/Glossaries and I can see it being useful to constitute Help WIKIs and FAQs for our applications.
I also have some personal experience with an older version of TWiki that I used in a project a while back and the latest version is a lot more “polished” than it was when I used it. It is also relatively easy to skin, something which I found quite complicated in XWiki the last time I looked.
Bottom line is that I will be happy whatever we choose as long as we choose something rapidly. I would also welcome more than one solution as choice is a good thing!
on Mar 7th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Hi Graham, I should have double-checked, I’ll do it next time
I see you are interested by organization / categorization capabilities. I am not a developer myself, but I think XWiki now has a tagging system that could answer some of your needs. The blog application also uses categories, they could be adapted to suit a specific purpose. And you can build FAQ applications easily, too.
Since both Tags and Categories are implemented through the use of objects within pages, you could create your very own categorization system if you wanted to. Then you just have to write a script to launch a search on specific items. This is where the flexibility really comes in… And this is where the danger of using applications at the detriment of content lies, too.
I see what you mean about giving more importance to content. I profoundly agree with this, since the main advantage of a wiki is to let people share and interact with content easily. In a perfect world we should be able to interact on Office documents directly from inside the wiki (somehow like putting Google Docs inside the wiki…). I currently do this with an iframe and this is quite powerful.
About the time your organization spends on testing, I’d say that both ways of doing have their drawbacks: starting immediately with something may mean that you will not switch to a more efficient version later on since you have got used to the one you are using, you have already put some content on it and so on… Migration issues can be quite annoying. If however the aim is primarily to test the wiki concept itself within your company, starting *now* with something is probably a better solution.
Late thought about “rich” wikis: since a wiki is primarily what you decide to do with it, nothing prevents you from using a “rich” wiki primarily as a “usual” one and take advantage of application features only when they actually bring value to your end users. Since giving wiki newcomers a template to start from (rather than a blank page) sometimes help them go on and edit their first wiki page and get used to the process, the feature can be useful.
Last point: MediaWiki and TWiki are obvisously more polished right now, but the 1.0 Beta version of XWiki we released on Monday is well-finished too… Even though skinning still takes some time to get to grips with !
on Mar 7th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Very stimulating comments Guillaume thanks again.
Once again your reasons make sense although here again Mediawiki does what it does out of the box and XWiki requires effort. Last time I looked (and btw we are using 1.0b3) it is only possible to tag a page once (multiple tags didn’t appear to work).
Could you elaborate on your comment “I currently do this with an iframe and this is quite powerful.” as Google Docs and Spreadsheets of which I am an avid (non professional
) user works splendidly. It empowers users at the document level and I would really like to see that implemented in organizations.
Hope you are happy and having fun!
on Mar 7th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Hi Graham,
this surprises me since tagging a page with “Hello Goodbye” or alternatively “Hello | Goodbye” or “Hello, Goodbye” works for me (the Tags page displays both tags, and clicking on one tag shows me the list of all tagged pages). Maybe a bug we fixed in the meanwhile
About integration of an Office document within a XWiki page I was talking about this : http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Code/ViewOfficeDocument . You can do the same quite effectively with a Google Doc (for now it requires people with an account of your wiki to have another google account working to access the doc if it is protected, but we have a Google Summer of Code project aiming at completing this integration, see http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/Google Docs Integration)
I am really having fun working with wikis since there is so many ways one could think about using them… I have plenty of ideas on how you could use a wiki as an external communication tool, use RSS to create light workflow processes inside your wiki, use them in education, for a sports team (I could go on for such a while that I’d rather stop now
) Another thing that I really enjoyed when learnign to play with XWiki was the fact that you can put whatever widget you want inside it (last time I played was here: http://wikiwed.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WikiBC Mashup).
Whatever your final choice I hope your wiki implementation will be successful since I firmly believe that wikis have the potential to chnage the way we think about collaboration, how we communicate wth others and so on… In terms of cultural change (towards more openness within a company for instance) wikis represent an amazing evolution and I hope more and more company will catch on. Yours is still amongst early adopters, well done! I’m sure you must have had some management / administrative hurdles to overcome in order to be allowed to run a wiki in your company…