The current state of sales enablement

If you're working for a large corporation, you're probably aware that big companies store content. Huge amounts of content. They store content about their customers, their processes and their products.

Your marketing department produces sales assets, white papers and customer case studies. Your sales organization comes up with best practices based on feedback from the field. Product managers publish documents about your company's solutions and its offering. In a big company, you're overloaded with content.

Although it may sound great (who wouldn't want to have access to all that sales-supporting knowledge?), having access to seemingly unlimited amounts of content comes with a number of hindrances.

According to Forrester Research & IDC Sales Advisory Service:

• $135,262 is spent, on average, in support costs per year for each salesperson
• 7 hours per week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls
• 50 percent of the information is pushed through email
• Only 10 percent is “made available in a useful format”

There should be a better way to access and leverage all that content.

Objectives of sales enablement

That's why our customers are using XWiki as a platform for their sales enablement initiatives. Wikipedia defines sales enablement as "the process of arming an organization’s sales force with access to the insight, experts, and information that will ultimately increase revenue."

Our customers' main goals are simple:

• Give a second life to all of their existing content that it currently not being leveraged
• Make it faster for salespeople to access relevant product and solution information when they need it
• Provide information in a format that's easy to leverage for creating sales proposals
• Let salespersons and marketers communicate more effectively with each other

Turn your sales materials in a package that is easy to use for your sales reps. Credits: L.Marie

XWiki: a great sales enablement tool

Here's a short overwiew of how you can leverage XWiki's feature set to achieve your sales enablement objectives:

• You can start by doing something useful with all of your existing data by importing Word files into your wiki
• Once your content is on the platform, you can give your salespersons powerful search and discovery tools
• All of the content is easy to access and reuse thanks to the web interface and Word & PDF export
• You can empower your salespeople into providing useful feedback through comments and ratings

You can use XWiki to publish and improve your sales enablement information.

Contact me at guillaume@xwiki.com if you'd like to find out more about how you could use XWiki solutions to empower your salesforce.

Guillaume, International Sales

Make annotations

To make an annotation to a piece of text all you have to do is select the text, hit "Ctrl + M" and a dialog will appear where you may enter the text you want to associate with the selection. Click "Add annotation" and you're done.

Show annotations

By default annotations are not shown within the page. You may change this at any time by clicking the annotations link at the top of the page and checking "Show Annotations".

To see an annotation for a text item hover over the yellow icon next to it.

Edit/Delete annotations

You can edit an annotation straight from the page. Hover over the annotation and click on the yellow pen. Once you are done with the changes click "Update". To delete the annotation click on the red "X" button.

Now that you've seen a short description of what the annotations feature can do you may want check out the documentation page and the release notes for more information, or better yet download the latest XWiki Enterprise and try it for yourself. We'd love to hear your feedback.

Some members of the XWiki Community

Lately I've been working a bit on recruiting and it made me think about how I started with XWiki and how it's grown on me ever since. As a result I've come up with a blog post to sum up some of the myths about open source I faced at arrival and how they were confirmed or proven prejudices after a while.

Speeding the learning process

I'm glad to say I now have experience working with both open and closed source companies. I've found that while in a closed company there are many things to learn, in OS communities the learning process is much faster due to the higher number of contributions, the diverse community and the speedy release process. Either you're an employee, or a non-paid contributor you can be sure that joining the OS community will prove a very fruitful professional experience.

Competition & Community: a successful duo

Another thing I've noticed is that while in the typical company competition is as high as anywhere else, often this run for achievements develops in rivalry between employees. As a result many will be reluctant to giving away their well kept sets of skills and professional advantages that make them an asset for the company. I was pleasantly surprised to find in the open source community a healthy competition, which I've grown to love. People are excited about their work and like to be recognized for their contributions, however there's also a sincere desire of helping one another in order to make the project run as smooth as possible. While in the typical firm the motivation is most frequently that of the personal good, in the OS community efforts are joined in a higher quest of making a good product everyone can enjoy and take pride in. For most of us it's nice to keep in mind there's a bigger purpose.

Responsibility & fear of potential embarrassment

When I started work at XWiki I knew almost nothing about OS. So I can tell from experience that starting to work for an OS company, and/or joining a new community can prove a bit difficult. Now it's not just you, trying to impress your boss, but a whole bunch of people watching over your work, making comments and suggestions. The fear of making mistakes is probably the biggest inhibitor when you decide to make a contribution. One thing you can do is just observe the ways of the community for a while by joining the IRC chats and the mailing lists. You can start contributing and making suggestions on smaller issues and as you grow accustomed increase your additions. One thing to remember is not to take replies personal. Everyone is working in order to make the same ends meet, so constructive criticism is only a way for other members to help you get there.

International community & diversity

Contributions to the OS software come from different kinds of people, all over the world. So in addition to this being a valuable professional experience it also proves a rich personal endeavor. One thing I was surprised about when I first joined the XWiki Romanian Office was to see such a big number of women amongst my colleagues. I expected the environment to be an all boys club, but actually girls exceeded in number.

As time passed and I grew more accustomed to the new environment I realized that this is no way an exception. Lots of women were also members in the community, asking and answering questions, adding applications and committing code to the platform. So this is another myth busted :)

Can I make a difference if I don't code?

Probably my biggest worry at joining XWiki was that in order to make a contribution one had to write code, otherwise their contribution wasn't needed. Nothing could be more far from the truth. I've been working closely with the community for months. I haven't written a single line of code and it's likely I'll continue in the same manner. There's a lot of ways one can make herself useful. For instance I've been testing the platform and applications, I've created new documentation and took an interest in improving the existing pages. I've also joined the lists by participating in discussions about the user experience and needs.

So either you code or not, either you're experienced or that which goes by the name of n00b, either you're a woman or a man, or live at different ends of the world, I hope I've outlined at least a couple of reasons that will convince you to join the community. If you're already a member of the community than I hope the article is a mere reminder of what you already knew and have grown to appreciate as much as I have.

Silvia, QA

Seeing existing themes

Changes have been brought to the display of the "Color Themes" space home. Where previously there was only a list of color themes you can now see a description of each theme.

Creating a new theme

You may create new themes straight from the "Color Themes" space home.

Editing a theme

When editing a theme hover over an area you'd like to edit and a palette will appear in the bottom left corner. Hover over the pallete and you'll be able to see everything you can customize at this level.

When you click on the pallete a different popup appears where you can make the desired changes.

If you're not satisfied with one or more changes at this level you can click the green arrows to revert the modifications. Should you not like any of the changes made since you started editing the theme you can always click the "Reset" button in the top right corner and start again.

Once you're happy with the modifications all you have to do is click "Save & View", refresh the page and you'll be able to see the changed theme. You may use the new theme at any time after that.

This is a short overview of the Color theme application. You can find more details on the documentation page and by reading the release notes. All that remains is for you to download XWiki Enterprise and discover all its cool, new features for yourself.

Caty welcomed them and did the warm-up session, then Silvia showed some insight on our marketing strategy. Being a former student myself, I was more then happy to talk about my daily responsibilities as a web developer. Marius gave our visitors some feedback about his experience as a new employee at XWiki, Miruna shared some "tricky" interview questions and Anca proved that fixing a bug is not as hard as it looks.

We organized a Wii tennis session, exchanged plenty of geek jokes and offered XWiki goodies to our guests. I hope the junior geeks had just as much fun as we did and we will be expecting them next year for some more geek talk.

Oana, Web Developer

• get in touch with other fellow developers;
• stay up to date with the latest developments practices in the Free Software and Open Source world;
• attend talks and presentations held by Free Software and Open Source project leaders and committers;
• promote Free Software and Open Source solutions.

Here are some photos from FOSDEM'10. Enjoy!

New Profile & WatchList UI

Our redesigned profile, with the new tab based display, allows you to:

• Modify your profile details
• Set your profile preferences
• Manage your watchlist

To accommodate these changes we:

• Use inline-based editing for modifying profile details
• Converted to XWiki Syntax 2.0
• Modified the Administrator menu.

New Registration page

On the newly improved registration page:

• Captchas can now be displayed for spam prevention
• All fields are checked as the user types
• After the registration all you have to do is click "Login" and you may start using your account

New XAR Import UI

The XAR import interface has been completely revamped.

UI for Deleted documents & attachments

Two new tabs have been introduced in the wiki's Document Index:

• Deleted Documents
• Deleted Attachments

New Menu in Edit mode

The different edition modes that used to be in a separate Panel are now in a new edit menu.

Comments UI improvements

You can now preview comments before submitting them.

There is also the possibility to edit your comments at a later time.

XWiki Enterprise brings many other improvements worth mentioning. Since all these won't fit in the space of a blog post, we recommend you check out the Release Notes and download XWiki Enterprise 2.2 to see for yourself all the new cool things it has to offer.

• Bringing the XWiki addon to Microsoft Office
• Enabling the Microsoft Office power editing and rich content creation for XWiki

There are many reasons why you should use XOffice. I've bundled a list of my favorites and put it into a blog post to whet your appetite:

1. Using the software you are accustomed to

If you are anything like me you enjoy editing text from the browser, but you'd rather be working from the editor you have grown accustomed to. XOffice helps you contribute to the wiki straight from your Microsoft Word editor.

2. Working offline

You find yourself with no internet access, but you'd still like to be able to contribute to your wiki. Provided you are using XOffice you can do all the writing offline from Microsoft Office and later get your work on the wiki with a few clicks.

3. Easy wiki navigation

Going from one page in your wiki to another has never been easier. The Wiki Explorer displays spaces, pages and attached files in a tree fashion on the right side of your screen.

4. Simple page editing

To edit a page all you have to do is right click on the page name in the Wiki Explorer and select "Edit this page".

5. Downloading Attachments

You can download attachments straight from the Wiki Explorer. Any attachment in your wiki is a few clicks away.

6. Text editing

To make use of all the benefits of text editing on the wiki you need to enable the toolbar features. When using Microsoft Word you already have access to all the text editing tools you need. Change the text to your liking and click "Publish document".

7. Reviewing content

Microsoft Word helps you save time by providing you with all the tools that help you deliver good quality content, be it a matter of spelling, grammar, research, translations, etc. Once you have reviewed your content click "Publish document" and the reviewed text will be shown on your wiki.

8. Find & Replace text

This is a useful feature, especially when you are editing large documents.

9. Image editing

With Microsoft Word and XOffice you can now perform image editing and immediately see the changes on your wiki. You don't need to use additional image editing tools. This also saves you the effort of attaching the image more than once. After you have attached the image the first time it is enough to click "Publish document" after you have modified it and all the changes will be reflected on your wiki.

10. Adding shapes, equations and much more

But don't take our word for it. You may download XOffice and test it yourself. We'd love to hear your feedback. We would also appreciate any suggestions on how we can make XOffice an even better tool to match your needs.