Sharepoint has an expensive licensing model, and TWiki is no longer free software, since TWiki,Inc. has pushed out virtually all developers from the TWiki Open Source community.

If you are looking for a powerful enterprise wiki that is driven by a large community of developers and consultants, I invite you to http://foswiki.org, where TWiki-now-Foswiki development continues.

I understand your frustration , regarding the contradiction between the promised and delivered (Sales and Marketing Departments tend to do that).

One point I would like to share with you , SharePoint is not a full product it is a very sophisticated collaboration framework , that requires customization in almost 90% of the time.

Early and long design and analysis phase is required to make any SharePoint a success. Like any other framework .

If you you have any similar products or frameworks you can compare with SharePoint I am interested to know about (please include the cost as well , and in case of open source please include annual support for commercial and government contracts )

I totally agree that the licensing model for SharePoint(MOSS) for Internet applications is very expensive , and many companies don’t want that type of commitment.

Again , if you want to realy think about design and implement of a sharepoint Solution , think of Objects and Ontology. that will give you a better understanding .

Thanks for Sharing the Point

Try cutting your hair with the scissors of a swiss army knife. Clean and prep a fish with the knife (dare you to try!) or open 10 bottles of wine without breaking that teenie-little corkscrew.

Heck, carry it around for a week in your pocket without losing the little plastic tooth-pick. Go ahead, then get back to me about how good the “swiss army knife strategy” is.

To be clear, I’ve got absolute nothing against the Swiss-army-knife brand of products. They have their purpose, but it is NOT to replace a toolbox full of real tools. (note: enterprises deserve real tools)

Every technology has an implementation cost; if it looks “free” that just means the cost is hidden (not necessarily intentionally hidden, but hidden none the less).

Decision makers focused only on checklists need to stop looking for quick fixes and “freebies” and start paying attention to the implementation details. Once they’re doing that, they’ll see for themselves what’s “good” and what’s “bad”.

My pre-requisites for a collaboration tool:
-> open source, with contributors from various companies around the globe.
-> battle-tested – there’s no need for adopters to be guinea-pigs.
-> should be possible for a do-it-yourself type to learn and use for free.
-> the developers must “eat their own dogfood” – use the tool for their own collaboration.
-> should be able to run equally well on MS and Linux platforms

Thanks, Brian (and Lewis) for a fun read.

Regards,
-Paul Reiber, Reiber Labs

I believe Brian sees the fact that Sharepoint users can create whatever group memberships they feel is necessary for security as one of most the significant issues impeding enterprise collaboration. Though this is certainly an important consideration, I’m not sure I see this Sharepoint feature as the core challenge to organizations who have chosen to deploy wiki software.

TWiki also supports the ability to restrict access to content as needed. The flexibility to control access to information at some level is required within all enterprise organizations. Many of our customers insist on LDAP or AD integration in their deployments. What we observe in these cases, is that although the IT departments are proficient in managing user access to systems and sometimes even managing group membership at the department level, they can’t begin to manage ‘knowledge groups” at all. They are simply too dynamic. So that control has to come from somewhere outside of IT. In TWiki’s case, TWiki access controls can overlay LDAP, and also restrict read-write access to information w/o LDAP.

A much bigger collaboration issue confronting many organizations today is related not so much to the question of: ‘Does one tool make it too easy to lock down information?’,but more of: ‘How best to address the informational bias of many individuals and over arching corporate culture that keeps companies from realizing the true potential of a knowledge sharing organization?”. Many organizations we’ve seen have created greater barriers to collaboration because historically no one wiki was a good fit for all user types and the decision to buy or download free open source was typically made too low in the organization. Many of these departmental wiki silos have been created simply because early wikis didn’t have the nice WYSIWYG editors they do today and required the use a of a markup language that was different depending upon the wiki selected. Today there are converters that can be used to consolidate these silos. Relative the the cultural issues doing the consolidation work is a straight forward technical matter.

The fact that Lewis Shepherd, the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments took the time to comment on Brian’s points is noteworthy. That MSFT had to spend a $1.2B to acquire FAST’s search technology indicates how critical search is to delivering efficient enterprise collaboration solutions.

The latest version of Certified TWiki includes the Plucene search engine to quickly within Office based attachments. Because it’s indexed search, its very, very fast. It was natural to include Plucene in Certified TWiki because its open source. (THANK YOU! to the Plucene open source development team).

One observation we have of organizations with a deep understanding of wiki based collaboration and its impact on organizational knowledge, is that the amount of content residing in MS Office documents decreases dramatically- by more than 70%… So then the question really is; If Sharepoint’s main value is searching and storing office based information in a way that’s somewhat better than placing documents in NT file system and finding them with desktop search, how valuable is it when most content is created directly within the Wiki?

Some organizations in the midst of making the transition to true wiki based collaboration models have deployed interesting hybrids; They use Sharepoint, for the filestore but prefer TWiki for the wiki/web 2.0 collaboration engine front end. And in at least one case, because they had already deployed the Google search appliance within the enterprise, chose to integrate their existing search engine appliance with TWiki as the Mashup point.

David Pointzer Sr. Process Engineering Manager, R&D of Mars Inc. states it well. (They also have Sharepoint) “It is my experience that a true competitive advantage comes from not just getting the wiki tool that everyone can get and use. No advantage there, just keeping up. An advantage can be built by taking a look at how these tools can be customized and supercharged to facilitate your particular ways of working, culture, business, etc. This is where the TWiki solution is strongest.”

If you want to discover how many wikis silos you have within your organization, consider giving our WikiCrawler a spin. You might find the results surprising.

Cheers,

Will

All trademarks and copyrights contained in this Blog post are owned by their respective trademark and copyright holders.

http://twiki.net/blog_2009-05-08.html

These numbers are from real, painful, experience detailed at the listed URL.

Re: Less is more

That is definitely a key issue not only with MOSS but any collaboration technology. It is not without coincidence that simple collaboration tools such as twitter experience a huge adoption while basically providing just one feature.

While twitter’s merits are debatable, its model of simplicity can definitely serve as an example of a user-oriented design paradigm.

In the example you cite, (a) sounds trivial to “fix” and (b) who’s really to blame for over-exposing features to end-users in an organization’s deployment? I don’t use footnotes in Word on any regular basis, but there the command sits, up on the ribbon – so what? “Curse you, Ribbon!”