XWiki Workspaces And The Future Of Enterprise Web Applications

26 May 2008 5 min read

I've been thinking a lot about many social services of late. Twitter, FriendFeed, the facebook platform & API, the rise of microblogging & lifestreaming... This graph extracted from Google Trends brings us back to reality though :


From Google Trends

Facebook obviously rules the world of Google news & search queries. One of the features that helped facebook get that much coverage has obviously been the launch of their applicatin platform back in 2007 (more on the topic at the bottom of this article). Twitter hasn't seen that much of a growth yet compared with the other terms, probably reflecting on its position at a later stage in the public awareness scale (the tool is still in it early-adopter stage, let's talk about this @wikibc ;-) ). From my point of view the most interesting point the graph shows is that "wiki" has outgrown "blog" in number of Google search queries, which is a good reflection of the momentum wiki collaboration tools have gained of late.

In the meanwhile Sarah Perez has an interesting article up on Read/Write Web where she describes Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web. That article sounds particularly compelling to me since XWiki Workspaces basically answers the need she describes of newcomers willing to use Web 2.0 tools within their company.

Even though the usage of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tool is a rising trend, most companies are afraid of putting Web 2.0 communication & collaboration tool at work for a number of reasons. Those reasons include (but are not limited to) :

  • The burden caused by the lack of integration between applications (one wiki, one blog, one social network, one bookmarking tool, one corporat twitter, one...)
  • Security & configuration issues. Most IT departments already have spent hours configuring their LDAP systems properly. They do not want to try and manually configure rights in all of their applications.
  • Ease of use. Convincing corporate users to embrace a new technology is enough of a pain not to ask them to repeat the process three times in a row.

    Those very issues we set out to solve in XWiki Workspaces. In one single tool & unified user interface, XWiki Workspaces combines all the tools your organization might want to use (blog, wiki, activity streaming a.k.a twitter-like, image galleries, light file manager...) and a powerful application platform building on the XWiki API. This means that you can create new workspaces, choose the applications you want to use into them, and even ask your developers to write a new one if the one you need doesn't exist yet !

    Long story made short : imagine packing together facebook's application development capabilities, blogs, wikis, twitter, flickr and a file manager into an Open-Source, enterprise-friendly and easy-to-deploy software offering - that's XWiki Workspaces.


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XWiki SAS has long upheld its commitment to independence, with shareholders exclusively comprising current and former employees. However, recognizing the importance of strong collaboration among major open-source projects in the EU, the company is embracing a strategic shift through a symbolic investment in XWiki SAS from Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of Nextcloud. Moreover, Nextcloud GmbH and XWiki SAS have signed a mutual resellers' agreement to provide their customers an easy way to purchase a complete solution from either vendor. Read the full article to learn about the why, how, and what.