TWiki Success Story of SAP
Initial Introduction
No - Twiki is not used at whole
SAP ... unfortunately not... not yet? (wait,
see below for good news.)
I had the task to establish a knowledge base for a new huge software project. Since there were so many teams involved - even working in different continents - this knowledge base should fit the following needs:
- Accessibility from everywhere without having to do any software installation (just a browser).
- Registration of new users without administration overhead.
- Creating and Modification of new documents by any user - no power users or "keepers of the key"
- Collaboration Support - discussion forums, bug reports, feature discussion, shared editing, ... (we didn't really expect to get this)
- Convince the Hackers - the hardest job to do: How to convince software developers to write anything else besides code ... ,-)
- Homepages - find an easy way to create and maintain Homepages of single developers as well as dedicated team homepages.
- Cool features - like easy linking between documents, revision history, easy embedding of drawings, attachments, ... No, we really looked for that ... it seems like a miracle that Twiki does all of this and much much more
Installation of Twiki was easy (after we stopped trying to install it on Windows and used Linux instead): It was a half-an-hour-job to get the Webhome running and took two more hours to adapt & configure Apache, sendmail and Twiki itself.
Performance of Twiki is still excellent - even if Twiki fills up from day to day with documents, attachments and users ...
Everytime I visit Twiki Homepage at
https://twiki.org I get new ideas and inspirations.
Today - after 3 month - we have about 400 named users and get at least 20 document changes a day. 99 of 100 users love Twiki for its easyness ... but as Twiki grows each day there are some people telling me that Twiki is going to become "like the internet" ...
Finally I would like to thank the Twiki development team and
PeterThoeny in particular ...
Twiki is great ... we love it!
KlausWriessnegger - 23 Mar 2001
YES - TWiki at SAP is now used in all of SAP's development departments.
Years ago I led a project to set up an easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain web-based knowledge database for SAP's technology development department. This system was called BIS. We used and are still using the software configuration management system Perforce for document storage and versioning. Thanks to Klaus' excellent work this system has been successfully extended with TWiki functionality. BIS is now regarded as the major information system for all SAP programmers. Thanks a lot, Klaus.
JoachimSchnitter - 07 Jul 2003