Building Situational Applications with XWiki

Back in 2004 author Clay Shirky wrote a very interesting piece on Situational Applications. He defines them as follows:

"Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users."

In short, he argues that the cost of writing applications has become so low that it has become worthwhile to create focused applications for small groups of users:

"Small, purpose-built apps have always existed, of course. Now, though, the combination of good tools, talented users and the internet as a social stage makes the construction of such software simpler, the quality of the result better, and the delivery to the users as simple as clicking a link. The design center of a dozen users, so hard to serve in the past, may become normal practice."

XWiki offers a platform on which a company can quickly and effectively build such small applications for its employees. Examples of such applications include a company-specific project management tool that we created for one of our customers or a process documentation tool that we built for another.

In essence, using XWiki as a rapid application development platform provides your team with all the tools they need to create great collaborative applications quickly. That's why we call it the second generation wiki.

Once XWiki users find out about the fact that they can have pretty much any simple application they can think of built for them, they come up with plenty of ideas about what the perfect applications to support their business needs would be and we end up building a lot of such applications for them.

You can contact us if you'd like to find out more about the applications XWiki SAS has built for its customers.

Text edition in XWiki Enterprise 1.9 is awesome

I'm currently working on XWiki's answer to the French government call for Web 2.0 projects. We started a fresh XWiki Enterprise 1.9 instance to work together on our answer and I love using it:

  • Full-screen edition allows me to focus on what I'm writing
  • The Alt+Caps+S shortcut lets me save my modifications without reloading the page
  • I can create links easily thus keeping the whole thing organized
  • It's WYSIWYG so I don't need to worry about the syntax
Basically, it combines all the advantages of traditional desktop-based text editors with those of a wiki :-)

Wikis & Project Management

Successfully managing a project is often a difficult task. Mixing deadlines, a limited amount of time, money & people to achieve loosely defined stuff make a good recipe for disaster. Here is how a wiki might help you minimize the bill.

Centralizing Helps

One of the recurrent problems of having a project spanning various corporate boundaries (between teams & deparments for instance) is that stuff happens in many different places (mailboxes, Enterprise IM, phone, shared drives...). With a wiki, you can have everybody adding their stuff to a central place where it can be organized through links & tags and be made available to all the people involved.

Keep Track of What's Happening

Every business wiki has a built-in notification feature, be it through RSS, email, dedicated pages or many of them at once. You can use this feature to stay up-to-date on who's contributing what & when they're doing it. Thanks to this, you won't have people arguing on whether or not the mail they were supposed to send ever arrived on time: if it's not on the wiki, it isn't there. Productivity seldom accommodates nitpickyness.

Share & Organize

Wiki pages are a great place to jot down every kind of information, ranging from a PDF or a MS Word file to a plain old scanned paper-note. Most search tools nowadays will be able to search into the content of pages & text attachments and rank the results to provide you with an effective way to access information. Even when loosely classified, the data you need will remain available on your wiki.

So mastering project management sounds good to you... what are you waiting to try and go wiki

A Semantic Wiki?

It looks like "Semantic Web" is well on its way to become Web 3.0 most serious contender. But what is it all about?

To make a long story short, semantic web is a revolution currently going through its early stages. An example will make it easier to grasp: imagine you're looking into Wikipedia, willing to search only for XVIIth century French Poets. If nobody took the time to write a list of them, you're in for a long and strenuous time searching through heavy loadsof abstruse web pages.

This is where semantics get in. Imagine that, every time one adds a Poet name, he could "label" it with such informations as his birth and death dates, his nationality and the fact that he is a Poet. Or, to put it another way: that on the Poet's Wikipedia page the Poet's birth date was labelled as such and his death date, nationality and status as well. Now you could launch a search saying "I want to search Poets, and their nationality attribute has to be French, and either their birth or death year date must start by 17"

Instead of strict categories, you now have a loose yet effective way to enrich information all around the place in your wiki. Combine this with the power of people freely allowed to add the bits of information they know about, and you end up with a naturally organized body of knowledge - yet nobody had to decide how to organize it beforehand.

This is what Semantic Web is all about, and I must admit it sounds pretty exciting to me.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

What's Your Wiki Bringing?

There is too much information around for anyone to read all of it. This is why numerous tools have emerged to help people manage, organize, classify, filter and sort information. RSS has been a great step towards personal information independance, allowing individuals greater freedom as to what heir informations sources could be and how often new data was made available.

Breathing Through

Even the best RSS reader will not prevent one from feeling overwhelmed by bits of information. Social news rating websites have stepped in to help people go a bit further and order and give meaning to information together. Digg, Wikio, Newsvine are as many examples of ways to sort information. Wikipedia has done a great job to bring the right information to the right place for the people who are looking after it, or at least it does so most of the time.

Going Further

However, even with the help of those tools irrelevant information keeps popping out most of the time. Could this be avoided? Probably not. Could this be reduced a bit more? Certainly. Interactions between people about blog articles could be centralized for a group in one place to let them discuss and share it more easily. This is exactly what a product like XWiki Watch is aiming at doing, providing a team with a place where it will be able to share information and enrich it collaboratively.

Staying Ahead

The right question however is, why are all those information flows so important? Because, in today's world, information provides you with an advantage over your competitors. It has amways done so, but something changed recentlty: the speed at which relevant data can be exploited. A factory can be built quicker than ever before. Companies have to remain reactive not to get out of touch with their customer bases. A wiki provides a tool to let you communicate with the people who buy your products. Somehow, in their collective knowledge lies the products you will be offering them tomorrow. Isn't that worth a try?

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC