[xwiki-users] A quick questionnaire about xwiki at your orgainization

[Vincent Massol]

On May 2, 2007, at 11:52 AM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:

> Hi Jimmi,
>
> first, have you checked http://www.Xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ 
> References/ ? There is many examples of how / who uses XWiki there,  
> it may help. Actually I hope your organization's name will someday  
> figure there ;-)
>
> Here is some data I remember from various XWiki intalls :
>
> =================================================
> Capability
>
>
> * Number of wiki users at your organization
> The highest number of wiki users I am aware of is more than 20 000  
> on Mandriva and more than 10 000 on Curriki.

I think Curriki is > 20k

> * Number of maximum concurrent users
> I am not sure of the data for this one. There is probably some data  
> somewhere for XWiki.org but I do not know who has access to it.
>
> Wiki Engine reliability (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is best and 1 is  
> worst)
>
> I'd probably give this a 4 or a 5, but I'm not sure of the meaning  
> of the question. If you meant "does the wiki engine behave randomly  
> or erratically", I'd say that with the coming 1.0 release the  
> engine is reliable, so that's a 4 or a 5 when used with standard  
> configuration (Apache Tomcat, supported database and so on...)
>
> Usability
>
>
> * Wiki Engine usability (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is best and 1 is  
> worst)
> There is some work going on right now on the improvement of the  
> standard wiki usability. Its is currently at about 3, with the aim  
> of reaching a 5 soon :-) However you should be aware that since you  
> can write your own skin and completely customze the look of your  
> XWiki usability may be better / worst on your customized installation.
>
> * Training / learning curve  (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is easiest  
> and 1 is
> most difficult)
>
> Depend on what you want to do, as a user or as a developer. As an  
> user, with the WYSIWYG editor using XWIki is as difficult as  
> clicking on the "edit" button, so the learning curve is fast. As a  
> developer, it depends on what you want to achieve but the community  
> resources and the content on XWiki.org are a good help. Once you  
> grasped XWiki core concepts the learning curve gets faster.
>
> Cost
>
>
> * Hardware requirements
> Depends on whether you want to start with a hosted version or do  
> the hosting yourself. You'll probably need a server :-)
>
> * Cost (license fee, hosting fee etc)
>
> The cost depend on the license you want to use. If you are using  
> the Open-Source license, it will cost nothing in itself and you  
> will have internal development costs to achieve the XWiki you want  
> (with specific applications, skin, etc...).
>
> You can also use a packaged version of XWiki (that is, fully ready  
> to use), you should contact pascal at xwiki.com to get an idea of the  
> offering and pricing. In short depending on the size of your  
> organization you can use a wiki or a wiki farm with a setup cost  
> and a yearly subscription fee.
>
> Support
>
> * Data backup and recovery (i.e. do you have daily back up  
> procedures in
> place and is it difficult to backup and recover the data if there is a
> disaster?)
> (can you restore just a page or space instead of the whole wiki if a
> page/space is messed up?)
>
> I think Vincent is operating a regular backup on XWiki.org. This is  
> made easy with XWiki thanks to the Export feature which lets you  
> export all the content of your XWiki instance and store it in a XAR  
> file (you can read it with any ZIP software). If you want to import  
> back a specific space or page, you can do it by modifying the XAR  
> file so that it will contain only the files you want to bring back.  
> In short, data backup is easy, 5.

XAR export is nice for small wikis. However the best for backups is  
to simply backup the database as we're doing for xwiki.org and other  
wikis of the xwiki.com farm.

Of course if you use the DB backup it's going to be harder to restore  
just one page. If you do the XAR export it's easy. Only issue with  
XAR export is the XAR import. Indeed you'll need to upload it back to  
your wiki and it means you'll need enough memory for that. Which is  
why I'm saying it's for relatively small wikis as of now. We should  
improve this in the future so that it doesn't use that much memory.

>  * How difficult is the administration? (i.e. roughly how many  
> hours the
> administrator need to spend on the wiki maintenance?)
> This will probably depend on the number of users you have. Do you  
> mean only technical maintenance or reversing users random changes  
> too ? Tools such as the what's new, the customized RSS feeds, the  
> panels application and so on make the administration easy enough  
> but it could be improved. Maybe a 3.5 or 4...
>
> * How is the quality of support of this wiki engine (from the  
> commercial
> vendor or the community. i.e. can you get timely answers for your
> questions?)  (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is best and 1 is worst)
>
> The community support is really good, as you will know if you are a  
> regular user of this mailing list. On the commercial side, With  
> each XWiki offering comes a support contract that will provide you  
> with a guaranteed response time, less than 1 day, maybe even less,  
> check with Pascal. A 4.5 (for support is never good enough ;-)

XPertNet is offering commercial support for XWiki. You can contact  
XpertNet through http://xwiki.com

Thanks
-Vincent

PS: Of course Guillaume and I are working for XPertNet so we are  
biased. It would be good to hear from other xwiki users.



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