Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform™ Blog

Twiki, Inc.at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston

Catch Jitendra Kavathekar, CEO Twiki, Inc. at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, http://www.e2conf.com/.

Twiki Inc. has put together a power house panel to discuss an important topic, "Establishing ROI for Enterprise 2.0 - Imperative or Irrelevant?" - taking place tomorrow Wednesday, 2:15 PM-3:15 PM.

CIO surveys show that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are high on Enterprise IT priorities. However, a recent survey of CIOs by the 2.0 Adoption Council shows that over 80%; of CIOs have not been able to establish an ROI for E2.0 technologies. This is reflected in the widely varying pricing models of most E2.0 vendors, ranging from $3 per user to 100's of thousands of dollars for enterprise licenses. Value based pricing for E2.0 software requires a clear ROI measure. Contrast that with existing spend on E1.0 technologies in the enterprise, where clear value is reflected in healthy IT budgets. However, many E2.0 vendors avoid the "ROI" topic. Why the dissonance? This panel is part of the Enterprise 2.0 Business Challenges Track.

Jitendra will be joined by industry experts: Dion Hinchcliffe, Senior Vice President, Dachis Group; Carol Rozwell, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner; J.B. Holston, CEO & President, NewsGator Technologies, Inc; and Ron Lee, CEO, WiiKNO.

More information regarding the panel: http://bit.ly/9tds9P

2010-06-15 | Sheela Ursal | Category Marketing | Permalink

Twiki supports OpenID for flexible login options

Twiki Inc. announced the availability of OpenID for open source TWiki.

OpenID has been growing around the Internet as a response to the challenge of remembering multiple login and password for different web sites. Many organizations have worked together to develop the OpenID standard. It allows users the convenience of using one account at an OpenID provider to log into any sites which can act as OpenID Relying Party.

As a TWiki administrator managing existing installations you can choose to install the OpenID library which is available for download immediately on twiki.org.

The integration of OpenID 2.0 with existing TWiki installations enables users with OpenID accounts on AOL, Google, Hyves, MyID.net, MyOpenID, MySpace, NTT MyDocomo, Verisign, Yahoo or any other Open ID provider to log into TWiki seamlessly.

As you might know most Internet users already have at least one OpenID account at an existing provider, whether they realize it or not. Large user bases exist at Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, LiveJournal, Blogger and others. Facebook and Microsoft joined the OpenID Foundation and are working on it. Specialized identity providers such as MyOpenID and VeriSign also offer OpenID accounts. Japan's NTT Cable Internet users, half the population of the country, all have OpenID via their existing accounts.

The OpenID login functionality will be useful for public TWiki installations and extranets where people from different organizations want to collaborate more seamlessly and are not forced to remember multiple user names and passwords.

OpenID will be made available to Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform customers at a later date as an optional way to log in. Twiki Enterprise users have many internal and external partners that they collaborate with. The availability of OpenID within Twiki now offers Enterprise customers a great way to easily bring outside partners into the organization’s workspace.

Many of the several thousand publicly facing TWiki sites will also potentially benefit from the OpenID code installation. For example if Google calendar or Google docs are embedded into your TWiki pages, the user will not have to log in twice if they use the OpenID login. The OpenID facilitates integration of application much more seamlessly. A person’s session is noted and no second authentication is required.

The development of the TWiki OpenID integration was sponsored by a large entertainment company who graciously agreed to our suggestion that this module be released as Open Source. We were able to give back to the Open Source community; which contributed much to make this possible, and in turn were able to harness the power of crowd sourcing for ongoing code maintenance.

Check out the TWiki.org blog by Ian Kluft, who implemented the OpenID integration on the TWiki platform, http://bit.ly/twopenid.

Most providers today support OpenID 2.0. TWiki's latest integration supports OpenID 1.1 and 2.0. About four years ago an OpenID 1.1 integration was made available to TWiki, but the source code was not released to the community. With the latest integration we have released the source code to the community and also support extensive web based user and admin maintenance functionality.

The OpenID integration will be compatible with the upcoming TWiki 5.0 release, stay tuned for more.

The press release from this morning from Twiki, Inc. talks about OpenID availability on TWiki, http://bit.ly/c7ZaqL.

2010-05-03 | Jitendra Kavathekar | Category General | Permalink

Thank you CMU and NASA for the Innovator Award for Twiki's Gov 2.0 solution

We are honored to receive the Disaster Management Initiative (DMI) Concept-Stage Project Innovator Award for our Gov 2.0 solution presented to us by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center.

Thank you Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley for giving us the opportunity to be part of your community in developing next generation solutions to improve coordination and collaboration between Citizens, Emergency Responders and Command Centers.

Speical Thanks to Martin Griss, Director Director of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and Jim Wollbrinck, Security and Emergency Preparedness Specialist, San Jose Water Co. for taking the time to share your thoughts and congratulating us on the award.

Thank you to Wendy Fong from Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and Sylvia Leong from NASA Ames Research for hosting us during the Crisis Camp Silicon Valley.

Thank you Bob Gourley for being a great advisor and helping us spread the word about the award via your blog http://ctovision.com.

Twiki DMI Innovator Award presented by CMU and NASA

2010-04-15 | Sheela Ursal | Category General | Permalink

AlwaysOn's inagural OnDemand conference to feature Twiki Inc as a "Top Seed Stage Companies to Watch" on April 21st, 2010

We are excited to announce that AlwaysOn has recognized Twiki, Inc. as an "AlwaysOn Top Seed Companies to Watch" in its OnDemand summit. Our CEO, Jitendra Kavathekar will be highlighted in the CEO Showcase and will talk about Twiki's vision Enterprise Collaboration in the cloud.

AlwaysOn Network was founded by Silicon Valley thought leader and author Tony Perkins to bring together the top minds and entrepreneurs to break down the challenges facing their respective industries. Today, AlwaysOn events have become the preeminent executive summits driving industry change.

In its inaugural year, OnDemand 2010 is where the top Internet companies disrupting the enterprise square off with the incumbent players pioneering cloud computing and SaaS. This two-and-a-half day executive event features high-level debates on how the Internet is disrupting how companies, from small businesses to large enterprises, create, store, distribute, analyze, and take advantage of their mission-critical data. OnDemand also showcases the top entrepreneurial CEOs who are revolutionizing the way the enterprise is radicalized by the Internet.

Jitendra will be highlighted in the CEO Showcase for Seed companies where he will discuss how enterprise collaboration is transforming companies, and how the transition to OnDemand services are making it easy for companies to experience rapid adoption.

We are proud to be included, and we invite you to register and join us for the Jeet's panel discussion. Stop by and say "hi", here are the details:

CEO Showcase presentation is a "Seed Track" at the "OnDemand" conference. It is scheduled to take place at the Hewlett-Packard Company World Headquarters, April 19-21. CEO Showcase panel featuring Twiki Inc will be held on Wednesday, April 21, at 2:50pm

You can find more information about the event at: AlwaysOn OnDemand 2010

2010-04-14 | Sheela Ursal | Category General | Permalink

Jitendra speaking at VC Task Force panel tonight

Catch Jitendra Kavathekar, CEO Twiki, Inc. tonight at the VC Taskforce panel event discussing the role and impact of Web 2.0 technologies on the enterprise.

How are classic functions and roles enhanced by new Social Media platforms? How does the entire company win?

The panel will identify relevant technologies, cultural shifts, and purchasing behaviors to help drive adoption of these new technologies.

He will be joined by industry experts from HP, Oracle, Elance, Wildfire, YouSendIt, and Involver.

Details: http://bit.ly/dk3V12

2010-03-31 | Sheela Ursal | Category Best Practices | Permalink

Meet us in Boston, June 14 -19 2010

Many of our friends, customers and supporters came to vote us (thank you!) into the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad finals at the last E2.0 Conference in San Francisco. We were honored to be on the keynote demo stage.

We'll be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this summer, and have an exciting set of panels and talks lined up. They were selected through a community vote (thank you again!), and the final selection by the E2.0 conference advisory board is pending. See the list of all Community selected talks here

You can check out all our talks/panels here:

Collaboration to Save Lives (Featuring our partners from Carnegie Mellon University's Disaster Management Initiative, the Emergency Communications Leadership and Innovation center, and the security and emergency preparedness specialists at the San Jose Water Co.)

Hitchhiker's guide to Enterprise 2.0 ROI (With our friends from Box.net, Saba and Gartner)

Collaboration in China (With our partners from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Source)

E2.0 - Embrace and Extend E1.0 (Featuring our CTO Peter Thoeny and Dan Woods, co-author of Wikis for Dummies and prominent Forbes.com author)

2010-02-01 | Milind Pansare | Category Community | Permalink

SalesForce Chatter

Sales Force, Inc. made a big push last week introducing "Chatter", indicating that Enterprise Social Networking is suddenly something for all businesses to pay attention to. In the old days, chatter meant 'to talk rapidly in a foolish or purposeless way', so from a marketing perspective this is an interesting choice for a platform name. In my apparently dated way of thinking, 'chatter' was and is not something encouraged by most corporations. SalesForce's use of this label does not help make the argument that Enterprise Social Networking provides value to the organization. It only makes one wonder if the name was overly influenced by Twitter's success.

SalesForce openly admits they have yet to even deploy the software internally while their CEO Benioff said in an interview (captured in a BusinessWeek article) at the company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco: "Collaboration is becoming a big part of how our customers will work". So what this looks like from the outside is a 'we don't use our own products for collaborating just yet, but we will have a really neat collaboration platform for you shortly' kind of announcement. Seems a little "me too", following John Chambers at Cisco. In any event, Benioff is now another voice openly recognizing the value of what we've helped our customers achieve from the moment Twiki, Inc. was formed two years ago.

If you want some very good insight into how to position your organization to benefit from this transition independent of the vendor platform discussion, it's definitely worth the time to read Andrew McAfee's "Enterprise 2.0".

From the start, Twiki, Inc. has run on the Twiki collaboration platform. Yes, we do use email and yes we also have a non-twiki based AP/AR system, but what might come as surprise to many is that we use a well integrated CRM and sales force automation tool built on Twiki that includes a Enterprise Social Networking feature called TWikiConnect (complete with Facebook like functionality but designed for corporate use). TwikiConnect has been deployed by our customers for over a year now, integrated with LDAP or Active Directory. And unlike SalesForce, we don't dictate to the customer regarding operating model being in the cloud or on their H/W behind the corporate firewall - we support whichever deployment approach is recommended by your IT organization.

Through this announcement SalesForce seems to recognize that their current Sales Force Automation product (very nicely implemented, despite being built on the old application development model with great reporting but lacking enterprise collaboration functionally), is really a hosted "Enterprise 1.0 application silo" and changing the existing SFA product to support true collaboration is not so easy.

Going back to traditional thinking again; Is it really news to anyone that in the agile Enterprise 2.0 model, the sales team also needs to collaborate with the rest of the organization?

Anyone want to have a 'chat' with us about collaboration or social networking in the age of the agile enterprise? Please give us a ring or post a Tweet to @Twiki.

I hope our marketing department doesn't suggest we introduce 'Twatter' as our SalesForce integration when we have one. Someone, please, help us with good name!

2009-11-23 | Will Thomas | Category Marketing | Permalink

Securing Twiki file attachments

One evening after the Enterprise 2.0 show at the Moscone Center earlier this week, I had a great meeting with Rob Murchison and Tom Shircliff of www.IntelligentBuildings.com. Rob is the Twiki Champion there and shared some very interesting Twiki use cases. During the conversation, Rob mentioned that the instructions on how to secure attachments in Twiki provided in the documentation at the twiki.org site were not all that clear. Taking Rob's feedback and after some discussions with our technical team, I updated the instructions at www.twiki.org.

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiAccessControl#Securing_File_Attachments

Any suggestions for additional improvements to Twiki are always welcome. Send us a mail at info@twiki.net or join the Twiki Community at www.twiki.org

I hope many folks find this information helpful.

Best,

Will

2009-11-06 | Will Thomas | Category Best Practices | Permalink