TWIKI.NET Open Source Enterprise Wiki - Blog Voice

Observations on Sharepoint by Brian Drake

Please see:

http://briandrake.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-sharepoint/

I fully agree with most all of Brian's comments, but would like to offer some additional thoughts.

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 the 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 IT. In TWiki's case TWiki access controls can overlay LDAP, and also restrict read-write access to information w/o LDAP.

The bigger collaboration issue within organizations is related not so much to the question of does one tool make it too easy to lock down information, but more a cultural understanding with regards to sharing knowledge within the entity. Many organization we see, have created greater barriers to collaboration within their organization, not because they have selected one tool with features that make them more or less useful, but because organizational or departmental silos have been created simply because no one wiki seems to fit all user types and historically the decision to buy or download free open source and they deploy was made too low in the organization.

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.

pencil 2009-05-08 | Will Thomas | Category General | Permalink

Matt Hodgson's views on the ROI of Social Networking in the enterprise

http://www.theappgap.com/roi-of-being-social-at-work.html

Matt's perspective on the effectiveness organizational teams as the justification for adopting Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) tools is interesting. Definitely recommended reading for anyone considering deploying TWikiConnect within their company.

pencil 2009-02-27 | Will Thomas | Category Best Practices | Permalink

TWIKI.NET is Finalist in LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards

lw-logo.png LinuxWorld Conference & Expo announced the finalists for their Product Excellence Awards. TWIKI.NET's OnDemand Enterprise hosting solution has been selected as a one of three finalists in the Best Application Development Tool category. The winner will be selected and announced on Tuesday, August 5th at the expo. See details at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Announces Finalists for Product Excellence Awards

pencil 2008-07-29 | Peter Thoeny | Category Marketing | Permalink

TWiki User Meetup in Silicon Valley, 2008-05-16

Our third Silicon Valley TWiki User Meet-up will take place at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale on 2008-05-16. This is a good opportunity to mingle with wiki aficionados and to learn from each other what does/does not work when deploying a wiki at work. We hope you can join the event, and possibly present how your organization is using TWiki?

Plug and Play Chefs will prepare gourmet pizza and provide drinks for this TWiki User Meet-Up; TWIKI.NET is sponsoring this event.

If you are interested in getting notified of future TWiki Meet-ups in the Silicon Valley you can subscribe to the [twiki-users-sfbay] mailing list at http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/twiki-users-sfbay.

pencil 2008-05-12 | Peter Thoeny | Category Community | Permalink

Scalability of TWiki

Sometimes we get the question on how well TWiki can scale. This blog post compiles scalability related information so that you can plan your TWiki deployment effectively.

Scaling Across Teams and Departments

TWiki was designed as an enterprise wiki from its inception. You find features specifically designed to support large deployments. Other wiki engines have a different focus and may lack some of these features. Wikis typically flourish in grassroots. Once at the radar screen of the CTO/CIO, grassroots wikis often get consolidated into a central TWiki. That is when scalability comes into play. Key scaling features of TWiki:

  • Multiple webs (workspaces):
    • You can create as many webs as you need. Some large TWiki deployments have over 1000 webs. Think of a web like a wiki within TWiki. Each team can get their own wiki. People need to register only once, then they can create content in their own space. If needed you can link across webs, such as to reference a registered user or an entry in the Glossary web.
  • Fine grained access control:
    • You can create TWikiGroups and restrict access to content for view and edit based on those groups. Although it is possible to restrict access on a topic (page) level, it is typically done on a web level for ease of administration.
  • Authentication:
    • In a large deployment it is advisable to authenticate users against your directory server, such as Active Directory or LDAP. That reduces the workload on registration/login questions.
  • File attachments:
    • TWiki has a per-topic namespace for file attachments. That means, if one team uploads a file called inventory.xls to their team page, and another team uploads a file of the same name to a different page, they will not collide. Try that with Mediawiki or other wikis.
    • You can limit the maximum size of attachments that can be uploaded. This can be done for the whole site and also on a web level.
  • Organize content:
  • Web 2.0 platform:
  • Create your own applications:
    • TWiki goes beyond Web 2.0: The TWiki platform is about user generated application logic. Your users can create situational applications that solve specific business needs, such as a bug tracker, a employee news portal, TWiki's Support web and more. You do not need to be a programmer; all application logic is done in TML (TWiki Markup Language) using TWiki forms, reports and optionally some HTML and JavaScript.
    • The IT department is in charge of the wiki dial tone and wants to have some control over the wiki deployment. With TWiki you allow users to experiment in a controlled environment. That is, IT can get the dreaded "shadow IT" under control.
  • Integrate:
    • TWiki has a plugin API and ready made plugins to connect to external databases. That way you can run a query in MySQL and other RDBMS and display the result in TWiki pages. Useful to show CRM data to sales teams and bug trends to engineering teams.

Server Selection, Caching, Load Balancing

Plan for adequate server hardware when you deploy TWiki. The following are ballpark figures for an sample TWiki deployment serving 1000 employees and 50,000 pages:

  • Enterprise class Linux
  • Dual core CPU 2.6 GHz
  • 2 GB RAM
  • RAID 1 or RAID 5 for redundancy
  • Dual power supply for redundancy
  • Plan disk space:
    • Page content: 15MB per 1000 page (yes, MB, not GB)
    • File attachments: 1GB per 1000 pages

If you have a high read to write ratio (such as a TWiki on the public internet) consider a caching solution and/or a load balanced setup.

  • Load balancing:
    • For high volume traffic sites it is possible to put TWiki on a load balanced setup. Here is an example:
      • Cisco Ace load balancer.
      • 3 webservers.
      • NAS storage back-end.
      • Webservers share data on NAS for pages, file attachments and log files.
    • In the early days, TWiki.org was on a load balanced server setup while hosted at SourceForge.net. Now it is on a single server. The TWiki community plans to move TWiki.org again to a load balanced server setup which will improve the performance considerably.

Scalability of Search

TWiki uses the Unix grep command to search content in real time. This enables flexible and powerful searches in real time, which is important for TWiki applications. Search is covered in related pages in the TWiki web: SearchHelp, VarSEARCH, QuerySearch, FormattedSearch, and on TWiki.org at TWiki:TWiki/SearchSupplement.

The real time search has a performance impact. Searching all webs in a TWiki sites with more than 50,000 pages can be slow. If you have a large TWiki deployment of more than 50,000 pages it is advisable to index TWiki content with a search engine. This can be done with a commercial search engine such as the Google Search Appliance or an open source search engine. TWiki currently has three open source search engine integrations: TWiki:Plugins.SearchEnginePluceneAddOn, TWiki:Plugins.SearchEngineSwishEAddOn and TWiki:Plugins.SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn. See more extensions on search.

To scale the queries of TWikiForms based TWiki applications look into TWiki:Plugins.DBCacheContrib and TWiki:Plugins.DBCachePlugin.

Flat File Back-end

TWiki currently requires only a flat file storage back-end. This has several advantages:

  • Simple installation
  • Simple backup and restore
  • Simple migration of content between TWiki installations (think of grassroots wiki consolidations, spin-offs and acquisitions of companies)
  • Well understood caching and replication technologies available
  • Resilient to data corruption

Some people express concerns that TWiki's flat file back-end does not scale. TWiki.org performs well on a single webserver with currently 40,000 users and 90,000 pages. For larger deployments you need a load balanced setup. We know of a number of large TWiki deployments, such as 300,000 pages at a Silicon Valley high-tech company, 1000+ webs at a major telco company, and 10,000+ users at a major financial institution in USA.

Some scaling factors:

  • TWiki scales well on number of webs, e.g. it does not matter much if you have 3 webs or 3000 webs.
  • TWiki has a limit on the number of pages in a web. You will see a performance impact if you have more than 20,000 pages in a single web. This depends on the file system/configuration used, on the bandwidth of your server I/O and on the memory installed.
  • TWiki scales well on the number of registered users. We have not done tests on the upper limit. It is also feasible to not register users in TWiki, e.g. to rely solely on LDAP login.

As stated above, performance can be addressed to some degree with caching and/or load balancing. The TWiki community is working on a pluggable storage back-end for DB support, see TWiki:Codev.TWikiRoadMap.

pencil 2008-03-25 | Peter Thoeny | Category Best Practices | Permalink

New Leadership Supporting Community

Dear TWiki open source community:

If you google the news on "twiki" you will see a lot of press coverage today.

Rod Beckstrom accepted a high level position within the US government. He was appointed to run the newly created National Cyber Security Center, which will operate within the Department of Homeland Security. I can't express in words how much I appreciate Rod's engagement with the company and with the community. A true leader.

I am thrilled to announce that we appointed Tom Barton as the new Chairman and interim CEO of TWIKI.NET. He is very much execution focused and has an excellent track record in developing vibrant open source communities. Tom was the Interim CEO of Cygnus Solutions, which was acquired by Red Hat Software in 1999. At Red Hat, he continued as Senior VP of Client Services. More recently, he was CEO at Rackable Systems, the company he made public.

Tom asked me to convey this message to the community:

I am very excited about joining TWIKI.NET and the TWiki community more broadly. We used TWiki extensively at my last company - Rackable Systems - and I saw the difference it made in our efficiency by improving departmental and cross functional collaboration, not just as a tool use by engineers to manage projects. TWiki was used throughout the organization. It virtually replaced our traditional IT managed intranet. For example, our TWiki based intranet contained all HR information, our quality system, manufacturing instructions and other business critical information.

My experience was that the software is extremely reliable. In the 4 years I was with the company, the only time the server failed was due to a hardware fault, so obviously the team has done some excellent coding. It is clearly the best enterprise wiki out there and has the most active and vibrant open source community. I am committed to making TWiki.org a success as much as I am committed to making TWIKI.NET a success. When I was at Cygnus Solutions, we had a very positive relationships with the GNU project, and through our efforts as a commercial company, we were able to fund a substantial portion of the development of core technologies like gcc, gdb, and glibc. I hope to help do the same with TWiki.

I asked Tom to participate in our upcoming open source release meeting on 31 Mar 2008. He can't participate this coming Monday since he will be out of the office all next week.

With Tom on board we will continue with the mission I stated last year on twiki.org. I believe TWIKI.NET executed well so far along the commitments:

  • Fund enhancements to open source project via consultants (editors, skins)
  • Organize and sponsor TWiki Community Summits (including Larry Wall)
  • Organize and sponsor TWiki Meet-ups
  • Secured expensive Sun hardware for twiki.org
  • Fund half a rack of hosting for twiki.org
  • Help publicize TWiki (such as TWiki's position in Gartner's magic quadrant)
  • Initiated TWiki merchandise (T-shirts)
  • Refer consulting work to consultants

Please let me know if you have suggestions on how TWIKI.NET can bring more value to the TWiki community in a most effective way. Please provide feedback on the TWIKI.NET page on TWiki.org.

pencil 2008-03-20 | Peter Thoeny | Category Community | Permalink

TWIKI.NET Sponsors YouTube Contest 2008

YouTube is the second most popular website in the world and every day over 10 million videos are watched on the site. It is a great platform to promote products and TWIKI.NET plans to tap into this to build the awareness of TWiki. All we need are some compelling videos!

The expertise to make these videos is out there in the TWiki community and every TWiki user we meet has their story to tell. All people need is a gentle push to get those cameras running and start posting TWiki videos on YouTube.

TWIKI.NET are sponsoring that gentle push to the tune of over $3,000 dollars with the TWiki YouTube video contest. We are awarding prizes for the top three as well as giving every qualifying video entrant a free T-shirt.

  • 1st Prize - $2,000
  • 2nd Prize - $750
  • 3rd Prize - $500

Find out how to enter by going to the TWiki community contest page on the TWiki.org website. Entry is free. All you need is a video camera, some ideas and you could be taking home $2,000.

pencil 2008-02-18 | Michael Corbett | Category Community | Permalink

Videos of TWiki Meetup 2007-11-29

TWIKI.NET organized the first Silicon Valley TWiki User Meetup at Plug and Play Tech Center on 29 Nov 2007, where more than 50 TWiki users participated in the event. We would like to share some videos.

TWiki Meetup introduction

Rod Beckstrom speaks on collaboration

Vicki Brown discusses how Yahoo! uses TWiki

Guy Martin presents Motorola's TWiki

pencil 2008-01-28 | Amir Shobeiri | Category Community | Permalink

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