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TWiki Case Study: Consultancy Aseaco AG

2010-02-25T12:12:06Z

As a mid size consulting company offering higly specialized services for SAP customers we were facing the requirement to create a new infrastructure for inhouse knowledge transfer. Up to then the existing solutions we were using created huge dumps of single documents of almost every possible format. Searching across documents was not possible and thus the overall usage of the system declined. As a result most of our knowledge was kept isolated in everybody's mind and personal laptop. While focusing on new concepts of collaboration on the customer side it became clear that we had to renew ourselves on the inside as well. As a consultant company we made quite some experience with several from our point of view mostly failed or inadequate approaches for knowledge management, project documentation and communication plattforms. This lead to some key requirements that had to be solved by a new solution: one tool for all: the new solution should serve as knowledge base where all informations from projects, ongoing work and internal processes could be found, while providing possibilities for adhoc collaboration to directly support our work with the customers. platform independence to avoid compatibility problems with clients using different OS no limitations due to proprietary formats or interfaces low system and infrastructure requirements to keep costs for licenses and administration low easy to use: the tool should be part of everybody's daily work without being a time consuming or complicated drag authorization concept to protect internal or confidential contents good performance when accessing via remote connection (VPN) Capability to search across contents and to link corresponding informations These requirements finally led to a first TWiki test installation on a laptop. While experimenting with the tool and checking out some extensions and plugins we finally decided to setup a server and to start using TWiki for some real work. At first TWiki was used more the classic way: create topics and attach some documents although not quite the intended use it was a step in the right direction: at least the content of the documents was now searchable and thus by far more accessible than before and topics could easily be linked to each other. But it did not take long until the tool usage became more intense and people started to think and work rather topic oriented than document oriented . Using functions like the ActionTracker and the notification service has made it easy to keep track on sales process and customer projects. Project teams can now easily share information without sending around emails with attachments creating numerous local copies of documents. By now a year after we have started TWiki has become the central tool in all parts of our company: intranet informations, documentation of customer projects, providing information on new technologies, meeting minutes, etc. By now the our TWiki installation ...

(last changed by MichaelGulitz)

Lunch & Learn Webinar: Structured Wikis at Work - Enterprise 2.0 in Action

2010-02-24T20:49:54Z

Please join us for tomorrow's webinar on: Structured Wikis at Work Enterprise 2.0 in Action. A wiki enables teams to organize and share content and knowledge in an organic and free manner, and to schedule, manage and document their daily activities. Learn from the founder of TWiki (Peter Thoeny), the leading open source enterprise Wiki what exactly a wiki is, and how you can use it to enhance the communications within your organization and between organizations. Learn also how a structured wiki can bring Enterprise 2.0 into the workplace. Date: Thursday, 2010 02 25 Time: 12:00 PM 12:45 PM PST RSVP: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/251641330 Presenter: PeterThoeny Title: Lunch Learn Webinar: Structured Wikis at Work Enterprise 2.0 in Action Agenda: Enterprise Collaboration Demo of Structured Wiki What is TWiki? Structured wikis Collaboration challenges at the workplace Wiki champion role Initial deployment of an enterprise wiki Overcoming barriers to adoption Pierre Khawand Founder CEO People OnTheGo http://www.people onthego.com pierre at people onthego.com

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Adding Geolocation to TWiki

2010-01-24T05:52:37Z

TWiki is continuing its path of innovation: TWiki has now plugin for geolocation. Geolocation is the identification of the real world geographic location of an Internet connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other. IP address geolocation data can include information such as country, region, city, postal/zip code, latitude, longitude and timezone.Ref. Wikipedia The recently released GeoLookupPlugin can be used to retrieve geolocation by IP address or domain name. This includes latitude/longitude, city, region, country name and code, postal code, metropolitan code and telephone area code. The plugin uses free geolocation data provided by MaxMind. It seems to be reasonable accurate for the USA, but I have found it quite unusable for Europe and other parts of the world. They offer a subscription for more accurate data. What can you do with geolocation? MaxMind mentions fraud detection, ad serving, traffic analytics, content customization and proxy detection. What can you do with geolocation in TWiki? Several things come to mind: 1. Where are people who register in TWiki? As a TWiki administrator, you can get location information of people registering in TWiki. In twiki/templates/registernotifyadmin.tmpl write this: has been registered with , , 2. Where am I connecting to the internet? You can show visitors where their ISP connects to the internet. For example, write this: http://maps.google.com/maps?z 12 ll }% to get this link: http://maps.google.com/maps?z 12 ll }% 3. Interactive Google map showing geolocation by IP address or domain name #WhereIs Geolocation by IP Address or Domain Name Enter IP address or domain name: " format " City: $city Region: $region Country: $country name Postal code: $postal code Telephone area code: $area code Longitude: $longitude Latitude: $latitude " }% Note: Geolocation data seems to be accurate only for North America View Larger Map Would you like to show this interactive map on your own TWiki? Install the GeoLookupPlugin, copy the raw text into the clipboard, and paste it in raw edit mode into your TWiki page. There are other usage scenarios for geolocation in TWiki. I am interested in learning what you come up with. Ideas? Please add a comment to share them with the TWiki community.

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Did TWiki.org go commercial?

2009-11-12T23:30:17Z

Once in a while I get asked if TWiki.org went commercial. I believe a clarifying blog post (on 12 month old news) is warranted because I have seen a lot of inaccurate and false statements in blogs and tweets on this subject. Short answer: TWiki.org has been an active open source project since its inception 11 years ago and will remain open source. A year ago we introduced a code of conduct and a TWiki Community Governance modeled after the successful Ubuntu community with the goal to scale the community and the project. At that time we changed from a community open source governance model (such as Debian) to a commercial open source governance model (such as Fedora/Red Hat, Zimbra, MySQL). Twiki Inc is continually supporting the TWiki community with twiki.org hosting, product enhancements, marketing activities and more. The details: I have seen TWiki growing up from a baby 11 years ago, through a enthusiastic learning period, then tremendous growth, up to a "Sturm und Drang" teenager age. Now it feels like TWiki is growing up into a responsible adolescent. The last few Sturm and Drang years were initially dominated by very active contributors. We had an active core community, but no clear code of conduct and governance. A ring of consultants tried to push their own commercial agenda on the project. This resulted in confusion, disagreements, and diminished contributions. And I was in the middle of it with own commercial entity that supported the community. In 2008 it was clear that we need a well defined governance model. I proposed one in spring 2008. A consultant prepared a counter proposal that would allow a ring of consultants to gain greater control over the project, install a different community lead and take more control over the TWiki trademark. There was much debate over whether the Debian style model would be in the best interest of the TWiki project or not. Personally I believe that a commercial open source model is a better fit for the TWiki project since we have been clearly focused on the enterprise from its inception. Riehle wrote an inspiring paper the commercial open source business model with community open source model. There are several examples of successful commercial open source business models that benefited the community and furthered the technology, for instance Fedora/Red Hat, Zimbra, MySQL. In October 2008 we instantiated the code of coduct and TWiki Community Governance modeled after the successful Ubuntu community. We took the proactive step to move towards commercial open source. I chose the Ubuntu model because it has proved to be scalable. My goal for TWiki is create the right context to scale big as a developer community, extension community, user community, consultant ecosystem and as the commercial Twiki Inc company. Some people who disagreed left the project to form a fork. Since then we regained a professional, courteous and helpful open source community. We have healthy downloads, an active user community ...

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Evolution of TWiki use at TU Delft

2009-11-05T22:33:51Z

The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands is running TWiki since 2004 at wiki.tudelft.nl. They created a nice visualization of the evolution of TWiki use from the very beginning, 5 years ago. Each node is a page, links are connections between pages. The graph is laid out using a force directed algorithm, where the edges (links between pages) pull the nodes (pages) together, and the nodes (pages) repel each other. IgorNikolic and Chris Davis created the visualization and the wiki growth over time. Nice work Igor and Chris! Peter Thoeny

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

TWiki User Meetup and Enterprise 2.0 Keynote in San Francisco, Nov 2009

2009-10-28T08:18:06Z

Dear TWiki users in the San Francisco Bay Area: Our fourth Silicon Valley TWiki User Meet up is happening in San Francisco to coincide with the Enterprise 2.0 Expo on 2009 11 04. 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. The organizers hope you can join the event, and possibly present how your organization is using TWiki? Place is TBD, watch TWikiMeetUpInSiliconValley for updates. Great News! TWiki is a Finalist for Best of Enterprise 2.0, in the prestigious Enterprise 2.0 Conference Launchpad. The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is in San Francisco next week, and we will be live on stage Wednesday November 4, at 2:15pm. Please join us in Room #134 for the live demo and then please support us at the Vote right after the final presentation. We are offering you, our friends, supporters and community a FREE pass to come join us at the conference. Please be there and "Vote for TWiki!". IMPORTANT NOTE: Last day to get your free pass is this Thursday, October 29: http://bit.ly/4qq82Z Hope to see you at the TWiki Meetup / E2.0 Keynote! Cheers, Peter

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Please vote for TWiki at Enterprise 2.0 Conference Launchpad

2009-10-12T23:44:05Z

TWiki got selected as a Quarter Finalist at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Launchpad contest. The Launchpad is looking for innovative applications to feature at the conference in San Francisco, 2009 11 02 to 04. Please support the TWiki project by voting for TWiki! Please don't delay, the deadline is this Wed 2009 10 14. With your help we have a good chance of winning, which helps promote the open source TWiki project. Vote at http://launchpad.e2conf.com/vote now/ (scroll down in the iFrame) See supporting video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v y NimstdDqs Please feel free to spread the word among your friends, co workers, your blog, in your mailing lists, tweets, Facebook status, LinkeIn status and in other social media. Thank you! Peter

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

TWiki.org Community Update, September 2009

2009-10-05T22:45:14Z

The TWiki.org community has been working hard on our upcoming Helsinki release along with making regular patch releases for the current version of TWiki. I would like to highlight some of the great work that people in the community have been doing during the month of September. First, a big thank you to the 11 people who attended our release meetings in September: Alex Bernegger, Ian Kluft, Jordan Koppole, Klaus Ethgen, Luke Vi, Milind Pansare, Peter Jones, Peter Nixon, Sopan Shewale and Steve Mokris. You can read the notes from the meetings or the IRC logs if you missed one, or would like to catch up on what we've been doing. We hold these release meetings every other Monday at 17:00 GMT, and anyone who would like to contribute to TWiki is welcome to attend. The next meeting is scheduled for October 12. September Highlights TWiki Community Release 4.3.2: This is a very stable patch release. Among others, it adds a user preference for raw edit or WYSIWYG edit, a crypt token based fix for CSRF vulnerability and an updated TinyMCEPlugin with the latest tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Updated HeadlinesPlugin: New touch parameter for HEADLINES variable. With this feature and the MailerContrib you can create automated newsletters that send out RSS news conditionally, e.g. only if there are any updates since the last newsletter. Key Statistics from the TWiki.org Community in September 5,767 downloads (total over 500,000) 3,104 page updates/month 484 new users (total 43,533 registered users) 845 new pages (total 96,986 pages) TWiki Advocacy: Support the TWiki.org Community Not enough time to get involved with TWiki development? Advocating TWiki is a good way to contribute back to the community it is an active way of saying "thank you" to the community members who spend countless hours improving TWiki. Word of mouth is a good way of spreading TWiki your help is greatly appreciated! More exposure means more contributions, and a better platform! To promote TWiki in magazines and web sites use the material in TWikiAdvocacy04x03. nop SourceForge.net introduced a project review feature with thumbs up/down. Help the TWiki community by your thumbs up to the TWiki project on nop SourceForge.net. Help the community by adding supportive comments to that mention TWiki. Help keep the entry on Wikipedia accurate and unbiased. If you are tweeting, you can help out when people about TWiki. Follow us on Twitter, http://twitter.com/twiki to keep up to date. Closing Remarks If you would like to get more involved in the TWiki.org community, we have an entire page devoted to ways that you can help. We can always use a hand, and there are plenty of ways that non developers and developers can help make TWiki.org better. As a contributor you can actively make a difference and help shape the product. Until next time, Peter Thoeny

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Please support the open source TWiki project

2009-07-11T05:14:04Z

The TWiki project got nominated as one of 10 finalists in the "Best Project for Enterprise" category at the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2009, this among 230,000 open source projects! We got nominated because of you, our passionate TWiki user community! Thank you very much! Voting is currently going on and closes on 20 Jul 2009. With your help we have a good shot at winning the Enterprise category! Voting is simple: Visit at http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/vote/?f 426 to vote. Add your e mail at the bottom and submit the form. Confirm your vote by clicking on the link you get in the e mail. We had fun creating a YouTube video to support the voting for TWiki: It helps you as a TWiki admin/user if we win because TWiki will get publicity, which attracts more developers and and support for the open source TWiki project. Please spread the word among your TWiki user community, coworkers/friends, and possibly tweet, blog, or otherwise promote it! If you use Twitter, here is the suggested tweet: TWiki finalist Enterprise category at SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. Vote for #twiki http://bit.ly/twote http://bit.ly/twvideo Add our voting badge to your website, wiki or blog to encourage your friends to support TWiki in the Community Choice Awards. For this badge: Vote for TWiki! write this HTML: Vote for TWiki! Looking at the other finalists in the Enterprise category, the open source TWiki project has a good chance of winning if we jointly promote the voting. Thank you for your support! Best regards, Peter (on behalf of the TWiki community)

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Sun Blue Print -- Best Practices for Deploying TWiki On GlassFish/LRWPinJava

2009-05-18T22:23:09Z

"Best Practices for Deploying TWiki Software On nop GlassFish Application Server Using nop LRWPinJava", a Sun blue print document for deploying TWiki applications has been published at the below URL: http://wikis.sun.com/display/BluePrints/Best Practices for Deploying TWiki Software On GlassFish Application Server Using LRWPinJava The Best Practices document describes running TWiki software under Glassfish/LRWPinJava with a 2x improvement in performance compared to Apache 2.0. A real use case, TWiki deployment within Sun is discussed in the paper. You can find a blurb on Sun ISV Engineering TWiki workflow here: http://blogs.sun.com/isve/entry/twiki for project work flow

(last changed by NagendraNagarajayya)

Nominate TWiki for 2009 SourceForge.net Community Choice Award

2009-05-16T06:27:47Z

The TWiki community needs your support! nop SourceForge.net is currently accepting nominations for their annual Community Choice Awards. They will be accepting nominations until May 29th, and the ten projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. Please project url http://TWiki.org/ nominate the open source TWiki at: Let's try to get TWiki into the finalists for "Best Project for the Enterprise" and "Most likely to change the way you do everything" ! (Make sure you select those two categories in the Category pick lists.) This will be a nice 10th birthday present if we get in! As you have seen in the previous post, TWiki is now 10 years young. TWiki project founder PeterThoeny

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Happy New Year -- 10 Years TWiki!

2009-01-02T07:05:11Z

Incredibly, TWiki is now 10 years young! Although I started TWiki in 1998, the oldest TWiki distribution I found is TWiki19990120.zip, e.g. 20 Jan 1999. TWiki re defined the wiki space from a pure shared publishing platform, to an enterprise wiki, to a web application platform. JostSpot copied the application wiki concept, but was later relaunched as Google Sites with stripped out application programmability. Other wikis follow the TWiki foot steps, such as XWiki and TikiWiki. From the bottom of my heart, thank you Tank You, THANK YOU for all the support you gave over the last 10 years! In October last year we relaunched the TWiki.org project to expand it to cover the needs of enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration (not just the wiki), to set clear open standards that encourage 3rd party contribution, and to expanded enterprise features. We also defined a governance structure and of conduct that is heavily modeled after the successful Ubuntu Linux community. I believe that the twiki.org project can build up on its success with clear leadership and a clearly defined code of conduct. The code of conduct describes the do's and don't's within the community, it already helped reduce the friction we had over the last three years. I encourage you to read it. A number of contributors who disagreed with the code of conduct left the project and created a fork. Since the time we established the new guidelines, 97% opted in to the code of conduct (1176 out of 1210 community members). We have now more members in the TWikiCommunityGroup than ever. We are listening to our users, more than ever. We strive to be more user focused, and less self centered on the developers community. The biggest issue we are told is the pain of upgrading TWiki; this is the reason why many TWikis currently in use are 2 to 4 versions back. In January or February we plan to release TWiki 4.3 that solves the upgrade pain, advances TWiki as a Web 2.0 player, and brings many usability enhancements. We are also improving the twiki.org website to be more user friendly. As a first step, we have now a much improved support website. You no longer need to think of a geeky WikiWord to submit a support question, and you can query existing questions by categories and extensions. Much more work is needed on the twiki.org website: Better landing pages, a redesigned homepage, and improved navigation. Are you a developer, tech writer or marketeer with interest in open source? Have you ever participated in an open source community? It's lots of fun to collaborate on a common goal. The twiki.org community is looking for additional contributors. As a contributor you can actively make a difference and help shape the product. To get started: Codev.TWikiMarketing for marketing Codev.ReadmeFirst for core code Plugins.ReadmeFirst for extensions (plugins, skins, add ons) Codev.WebPageAudienceSiteStructure for website redesign We'd love to get you involved! I wish the twiki ...

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Relaunch TWiki.org Project

2008-10-27T19:55:29Z

There are some tremendous opportunities for our project. In order to take full advantage of these, today Peter Thoeny and the management team at NET decided to re launch the TWiki.org project with a new governance model. We want to reach out to all community members to explain: why we decided to do this some thoughts on our new top level direction our invitation to re confirm your membership in the community We invite you to participate in this exciting new direction. Please read the details at http://twiki.org/cgi bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProject

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Project Network Diagrams From Tables

2008-11-04T01:12:15Z

Introduction CPM/PERT diagrams (which Microsoft Project refers to by the ambiguous name of "network diagrams") are useful for planning what needs to be done in what order. Often thought of as a "one off" project planning aid, more generally these precedence diagrams can be used for visualizing recurring procedures like the operations in a manufacturing assembly line, or even a guided procedure for business processes (like on boarding an employee, which can include orientation, provisioning of equipment, granting security access, and of course forms to be filled out). This application is based on Stefan Althoefer's Holiday Calendar Blog, which first showed how to generate diagrams from TWiki tables. In that respect, this blog is a sequel. Where Stefan's application requires the EasyTimelinePlugin, this one requires the DirectedGraphPlugin. In both cases, the script that generates the graph can be tedious to work with, and so tables enhance the usability. I prefer this application's diagrams to MS Project's because they are easier to configure, maintain, and read. It is also much easier collaborate on these diagrams with TWiki than to use MS Project's collaboration environment. Here's an example of a finished precedence diagram, based on a familiar process. (Of course everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time, but here's proof! With shading applied to completed nodes, you can see that our subject has been caught with his left leg unpanted). Figure 1: Sample Precedence Diagram "How To Get Dressed" the diagram in this topic is not dynamically updated because DirectedGraphPlugin and FilterPlugin are not installed at twiki.org. How it Works Step 1: Maintain Tables Two data tables are used in this application: 1. The (mandatory) set of nodes (tasks or milestones) with the following fields/columns: Node (row number): is the used by the predecessor field. To maintain the referential integrity nodes should not be renumbered, e.g., by deleting rows or sorting table. % nop EDITTABLE{changerows "add"}% was used to prevent rows from being deleted. Label: text that appears in diagram. Use \n to force a line break (e.g. to change the appearance of a node symbol. Predecessors: a text field of comma separated values. It would have been nice to use a multiple select here instead, but neither EditTablePlugin nor EditRowPlugin support multiple selects at this time. Large projects could use a separate topic for each node, and a predecessor field in a TWikiForm (since those do support multiple selects). But to avoid "topic proliferation" I would rather have the content in one place if possible. Milestone flag: an indicator to overload node the default node shape Completed flag: an indicator to overload node the default node shading Cluster name: a named group items (see below) Notes: long text that describes the task or milestone. 2. The (optional) set of "clusters" or groups of ...

(last changed by SeanCMorgan)

First TWiki book ever ... in German language!

2008-10-22T05:09:09Z

There we go! I would like to announce that there will be the first book about TWiki in German language available from November this year! Being passionate about TWiki since more than one year I thought that TWiki certainly deserves some more attention as it is the greatest Wiki ever! Since the twiki.org website and the documentation are of no real marketing benefit I wrote a book to introduce the power of TWiki to the market. The book starts with installing TWiki to write your first small plugin in Perl. It is targeted on newbies, everyday users and administrators, who have to introduce TWiki quickly. With the book comes a CD, which contains a full Vmware version of TWiki 4.2.3 containing all the samples described in the book. The concept of the book enables you to develop your own TWiki step by step. Those, who are interested or need a TWiki dictionary are welcome to have a look at: The book was written driven far more by enthusiasm rather than by commercial interests, which become obvious, if you know the rate per hour : ) . If somebody has questions or remark just send an email to Wolf

(last changed by WolfMarbach)

Issues Upgrading TWiki

2008-10-24T08:01:03Z

Having just made some positive comments in my last couple of blog posts, I must also, sadly, make some negative ones. The capability of the configure script to import plugins is I think a great advance a great shame I can't use it. My ISP has a certain set structure to its direcotries and my TWiki installationis therefore undera "TWiki" sirectry alongside the "cgi bin". The configure scriptseems to think the subdiredtories of TWiki are at the same level as cgi bin, so it copies the installer scripts into the directory above TWiki then can't find them when it tries to run them! Today I tried to upgrade to TWiki 4.2.3. It's been a disaster. I'm writing this as I roll back To my eariler version. Errors in even the EditTablePlugin I've no idea why, but my main "moan" is about using TinyMCE. I think it's a great idea for novice users it works well with new topics, sich as this posting, (although tonight even that went wrong it mangled my signature line by half converting it to I don't know what translation), but it's not good with old topics with complex structures such as the ones I've created for my ISO 9000 accounting systems. As an old fogey, I'd just rather it wasn't the default. It's just finished my copying I'm back to where I was 7 hours ago. Upgrading is still a major issue with TWiki.

(last changed by ChrisHogan)