A quick questionnaire about xwiki at your orgainization
Dear Community, My organization(a division in a US Federal Government agency) is going to select a wiki engine for a trans-organization collaboration effort. The current candidates are Confluence, XWiki, MediaWiki and Microsoft Sharepoint Wiki. I tried to promote XWIKI but have only used it in a very small scale environment (< 5 users). If you have used it in a production scale and can provide me some feedbacks based on the following questionnaire, it will be a great help for me to show to my manager. Thank you in advance! -Jimmy ================================================= Capability * Number of wiki users at your organization * Number of maximum concurrent users Wiki Engine reliability (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is best and 1 is worst) Usability * Wiki Engine usability (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is best and 1 is worst) * Training / learning curve (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is easiest and 1 is most difficult) Cost * Hardware requirements * Cost (license fee, hosting fee etc) 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?) * How difficult is the administration? (i.e. roughly how many hours the administrator need to spend on the wiki maintenance?) * 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)
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 <http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/References/Mandriva> and more than 10 000 on Curriki<http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/References/Curriki>.
* 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.orgare 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 [email protected] 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. * 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 ;-)
Hope this helps,
Guillaume -- http://wikibc.blogspot.com/
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 [email protected] 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.
Thank you Guillaume and Vincent. Your answers defintely will help me promoting xwiki here. Sorry some of the questions might not make much sense, it mainly comes from some non-technical folks. Personally I feel the support from the xwiki community is great. I am in the list of several open source projects but the reply rate of xwiki is one of the top. Please keep us with the great work!!! -Jimmy
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 [email protected] 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.
Folks, I have a question about the Calendar Application (http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Code/EventCalendarApplication). Can a single xwiki instance support more than one calendar instance at once? Is doing so just a matter of copying the handful of Calendar pages to another location? Is there a cleaner way to do that? Thanks! Sincerely, David Kane
Short answer: yes, it will support it. The faster way to do it would be simply copying the related page(s) and duplicating the class fields. There are much cleaner ways, but this would be the easiest in the short term. Also, just a minor warning: unless this changed recently, you cannot delete classes (even though it looks like it should delete, there remains a blank reference to them). Because of this, be careful when you create a class that you're happy with the name(s). I would also suggest making the names short, all lower-(or even camel-)cased to make it easier to remember when referencing them. -----Original Message----- From: Kane, David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 02 May 2007 16:20 To: [email protected] Subject: [xwiki-users] Multiple Calendar Instances Folks, I have a question about the Calendar Application (http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Code/EventCalendarApplication). Can a single xwiki instance support more than one calendar instance at once? Is doing so just a matter of copying the handful of Calendar pages to another location? Is there a cleaner way to do that? Thanks! Sincerely, David Kane
participants (5)
-
Esbach, Brandon -
Guillaume Lerouge -
jimmy＠comkraft.com -
Kane, David -
Vincent Massol