FAQ - Twiki® - Enterprise Agility Platform™, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Networking

What is Twiki?

Twiki is a versatile and powerful enterprise collaboration solution with full web 2.0 functionality, including Tagging, RSS news feeds/reads, blogging and a wiki. Twiki is used for all aspects of information sharing within an enterprise. Twiki is unique among enterprise collaboration platforms in that it can also be programmed by the end user to support the delivery of information based on business process.

• Twiki is by far the worlds most widely used enterprise collaboration platform that also supports enterprise social networking.
• The Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform can be deployed quickly and runs reliably. With the appropriate change management methodologies, it can become the information backbone for your company.
• The Twiki platform has as it's core engine an open source software core that has been developed, and tested by hundreds of developers over the past 10 years. In total, there are hundreds of man years of development contained in the product and related plug-ins.
• Twiki is used by teams globally distributed teams working at the world's leading technology firms to improve communication.
• Twiki allows your employees to rapidly build new websites, documents, and applications and to share them with specific audiences
• Twiki is secure and can be integrated with other enterprise services such as Active Directory and LDAP, with full password control and permission granularity to control access at user group and others level for read(view) and write access.
• Twiki is scalable; it is capable of supporting thousands of workspace and hundreds of thousands of pages.
• Twiki is extensible; If you don't see the functionality you need in one of the 100's of available plugins - write your own or have Twiki, Inc., or one of the many Twiki Partners develop one for you.

Who should consider using Twiki

Anyone in business, government, education or non-profits who wishes to share information and knowledge with the goal of becoming a more efficient organization.

• Small businesses of as few as 10 people immediately benefit from improved communication in all aspects of the business.
• Medium sized businesses with up to 1000 employees use Twiki to extend their collaboration to customer's and to their suppliers from a single server.
• Global enterprises with more than 10,000 employees are using Twiki to leverage their most precious resource. People.

Twiki is used across all industries - Finance, Telecom, Banking, Construction and Manufacturing. Twiki empowers IT departments, development groups, marketing, PR, finance, quality, sales and corporate executive offices, by disseminating the current information to those that need to know .

Historically, Twiki found it's grass-roots within engineering and IT organizations. With the addition of a WYSIWYG editor, and many usability features, Twiki's use is now extended throughout the organization. Progressive organizations are now enjoying the benefits derived by collaborating directly with customers and suppliers via Twiki based extranets using Twiki OnDemand.

Why should I consider using Twiki?

Because your competitor already is. The most valuable asset you have, people, can do a better job if presented the information they need to make the right decision and are encouraged to share what they know with your other team members, while the competition is buried or lost in their inbox email maelstrom.

The Twiki Enterprise Agility platform benefits your organization in the following areas:

• Reduce design cycles- get the product to market faster or complete the project sooner
• Eliminate confusion regarding the latest state of the company's best thinking on any subject
• Enhance collaboration: Help your teams organize and follow through
• Bring integrated, natural, user driven knowledge management into reality. Don't lose it when they leave.
• Deliver the most efficient business process application platform directly to the process owners.

Most Web 2.0 publishing and collaboration platforms are only made for publishing information or focus on the consumer. Twiki was architected and built as a robust enterprise application platform from day one. You can not only build applications at much lower costs than through other methods, but these applications are completely flexible and can be changed at any time with appropriate password access. Your employees and managers can build flexible, living applications on Twiki.

What is The Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform?

The Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform extends the powerful Twiki open source core with new functionality, and makes it easier to use, install, support and upgrade. The plug-ins included extend the functionality to go far beyond simple web page publishing. Enterprise Social Networking features such as Twiki Connect help connect the workplace with integration into enterprise directories (LDAP and Active Directory). The Certified Plug-ins have been thoroughly tested for compatibility and reliability, allowing you to focus on the creation and sharing of knowledge, not maintaining software. The plug-ins included in the platform are selected specifically to enhance business productivity. The Twiki Enterprise Agility platform enables situational agility through the easy development of situational applications and widgets using TML, an HTML-like extension. Flexible business patterns in your organization can be captured into repeatable workflows that can be built by business users and IT, with powerful connectors to bring legacy enterprise applications into Twiki.

How does Twiki integrate with other applications??

Twiki can be integrated with many other enterprise applications through an extensive set of plug-ins including an ODBC plug-in that can make calls to a relational database.

How can I transition from an unsynchronized email-attachment world to a knowledge based way of working?

One approach that works: Start simply- Deploy Twiki, create a page for a particular subject that you would like to share with other members of your team, department, organization within the company. Take the document that you were just about to send to folks via email and post it to the Twiki page. Maybe even take the huge leap of cutting the content from one of those proprietary formats and paste it into the Twiki page. Then copy the link to the page and send it in an email as an FYI or invite others to improve the content.

The amount of email (internal spam) will be significantly reduced, as will the number of documents created using those closed format applications.

Why is it called Twiki?

Peter Thoeny , Twiki's CTO, started developing the TWiki open source while working for Take Five Software in 1998. At first it was called T5Wiki but that name was too long so Peter coined "Twiki" as an abbreviated name and it stuck.

How do you pronounce Twiki?

The standard pronunciation is "Twiki" like "wiki." Some like to call it "tweekie." We call it Twiki like wiki.