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.