When the wiki's down

Our intranet is currently getting upgraded to the latest version of XWiki. This pretty much means that I cannot work. It's late Friday afternoon so most of our customers and prospects will not return emails and phone calls at this hour. As it turns out, I believe that this is a good thing.

We have come to a point where almost all of our internal communication and processes are done through XWiki:
  • Sales proposal are written and stored in wiki pages
  • Project-related information as well as processes and best practices are in a dedicated wiki
  • All of our HR information, including information related to potential hires, is in another wiki
  • Our marketing plans and strategy is stored in a wiki of its own
If that sounds like an awful lot of wikis, that's because we're using XWiki Enterprise Manager, which means that each department can easily manage its own wiki.

We're also seeing this phenomenon at our customers: when the wiki is down for maintenance, people can no longer do their work correctly. It's so tightly integrated in their daily work processes that spending time on the wiki has become a crucial part of their day. That's when you know that your solution matters.

On "The future of enterprise 2.0 is apps" (by @johnt )

I was reading an article outlining the vision for the future of enterprise collaboration platforms by John Tropea. He discusses existing options for collaboration software and outlines a vision for an unified platform. The question he ends up asking himself is the following:

"Could we actually move in reverse and make some of the tools a little less unstructured? Anyway, to come to the focus of the post, can we somehow use design another way to increase adoption?"

Here are the 3 key takeaways that struck me:

  • The vision of a unified platform addressing most (if not all) enterprise collaboration needs:
    "The whole idea is to not have data locked up in multiple tools; []. The other premise is that it’s cheaper buying one platform that can mildly do all things, rather than lots of focused products."
  • The need for content templates:
    "Wouldn’t it be good if wikis could offer layouts using tables, this way my page is on the way to be structured how I like in one click."
  • The need for additional structure, up to applications & an app store:
    "I’m thinking further than extending a wiki with pre-formatted pages, I’m thinking apps (ie new modules) for the platform are a unique thing offered by social computing and the Web 2.0 ethos of the user building stuff."

What resonates with me is that this is exactly the vision at the heart of XWiki software, especially our current development effort:

Clearly, we still have work to smooth things out, eliminate remaining rough edges and provide a full and comprehensive package, but we're definitely on the right track. It's nice to see our vision validated ex-post :-)

I'm looking for a sales guy

The year started very well at XWiki with a number of new and exciting projects coming in. The company's growing, now we need to grow the team as well.

I already wrote in the past about what it's like to work at XWiki. You can go and read that to get a feeling of what being a XWikier entails.

As for the new member of our sales team, here's who I'm looking for:
  • You're driven and motivated: I won't need to be on your back all the time asking for results
  • You know when to shut up: the biggest part of successful selling is careful listening
  • You've worked with customers before: you know how to deal with someone who wants to buy something from you
  • You don't over-promise and under-deliver: it's probably the biggest mistake I've made as a sales person
  • You can handle rejection: it's not because they didn't buy from you that you're not a great guy ;-)
If you're interested, you can find the full text of our offer (in French) here: http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Company/SalesOpenPosition 

You can also let me know directly at guillaume@xwiki.com

Side note: we're also looking for a project manager as well as a number of other positions.