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(a)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.