It being close to Halloween, I thought I would scare you with some new technology options in the collaboration world (as if there were not already enough, with about 2,000 solutions currently available).
A lot of people know Twiki as an open source wiki project that was started by Peter Thoeny almost 10 years ago. What many people don’t know is that like Acquia (commercialized Drupal) Twiki, Inc. has a new management team and has commercialized this wiki based platform for the enterprise. Their new tag line is “Enterprise Agility” and current customers include: Nokia, Carnagie Mellon University,and Sony Playstation. Subscriptions are on a yearly basis and like many other collaboration tools they have about a 3-4% conversion rate from free to paid subscriptions. About half their customers are hosted (SaaS) and about half licensed. Many of the licensed customers use a Twiki appliance which is on premise.
The big collaboration news with Twiki is Twiki Connect, which is an enterprise social network which can be added on top of the open source Twiki code. They have also announced (and will be showing) their “Enterprise Collaboration Patterns” which according to Twiki “this allows you to move beyond "
Facebook and
Twitter" style enterprise social networking, to discovering colleagues based on the collaborative patterns they are engaged in and their relevance to your work - and joining them in their workflows to achieve a common goal.”
I believe this is somewhat similar to what I have been saying about "Collaboration" for the last decade. I take a and look at people, process and technology. It is only within a process that you can derive a value for collaboration. With their new Patterns tool, Twiki is giving their technology more value by allowing it to be integrated with critical enterprise processes and providing value to people in supporting specific interactions within those processes. They can do normal collaboration things like: expertise discovery, or overcome time and distance barriers for distributed teams, but they have provided a platform for what I call “situational applications.” Situational applications are applications that have to be built quickly (not on an IT time frame) and may only be used for a short time.
A good example of this is
Mars (the candy company) who is pumping out about 5 new Twiki applications a month. Twiki integrates with LDAP and Active Directory, and other enterprise collaboration tools (like
WebEx) can be added to it. They also (like many other wiki vendors (
SocialText,
Atlassian,
Mindtouch, etc.)) have a connector to
Microsoft SharePoint. Twiki believes their big difference from other wiki vendors is their enterprise readiness, and their collaboration patterns allow them to integrate with current corporate workflows instead of trying to change people’s behavior and work to fit the collaboration tool.
Comments
I agree with you about the human barriers. It is much easier to change a line of code in a collaboration tool, emc training than to change someone's attitude or behavior. Many people are paralyzed by too many features or choices. So by limiting features or choices you actually make it easier for them to use. That is why I recommend to many of the collaboration tool companies I work with to make the use "easy." What I mean by easy is that it takes 1-2 clicks to do anything in the tool, cwna certification and that those features are intuitive, you don't have to watch a movie or get training of any sort to be productive in the tool. That does not mean you can't have a "pro" version of the tool, where experienced users can deal with more features, functions or choices.
But that is just one man's opinion.cissp training
David,
Great blog and thanks for covering Twiki. There has been a comment on this blog that I'd like to balance with some perspective. One of the great things about open source is that if you don't agree with a set of terms or a model (in this case the decision to go with a commercial open source model that's Ubuntu style versus a community open source i.e Debian style) you can fork and create your own project, subject to the appropriate open source license. Over time the best thing to do is for each to focus on strengthening their own technology and communities. At Twiki we are focusing on continuing to build the community and improve the technology. There have been several forks in the 11 year long history of the project as well, see http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/RelatedSoftwareProjects) , and we continue to execute to a commercial open source model in the tradition of MySQL, Zimbra, RedHat...
(Dirk Riehle has a great paper on the commercial open source model that's recommended reading, btw http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2009/the-commercial-open-source-busin...).
For more on this read the Twiki.org blog here: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry200911x2
regards
milind
Actually the corporatization of TWiki wasn't quite so painless as mentioned above.
Thoeny owned the brand (he trademarked it when he forked the project from
JOSwiki in 1998) but had become a minority code
contributor by the mid 2000s. The core was essentially rewritten by others in the later
years.
Then along comes TWiki.net (now Twiki, Inc.) with efforts to monetize the work of many for the
benefit of few. A community governance group was founded and negotiations were made in good
faith to allow TWiki.net to do their money quest -- so long as the name itself was handled
by the community and made available to others on an equal basis. This was rejected -- then
agreed to -- and then one minute before the usual weekly development meeting, rejected again
with all developers cut off from the twiki.org development website (by then
operated, "benevolently", by TWiki.net) until they indicated acceptance
of terms giving the new corporate entity and Peter Thoeny dictatorial control (he actually demanded
to be crowned dictator for life, though with the cushy term "benevolent" in front).
The result was astonishing. *Every* core developer (aside from Thoeny, of course) left --
that is, were kicked out for
nonacceptance of these unacceptable terms. This includes the last two release
managers and those who rearchitected the TWiki core. They immediately formed the
Foswiki project. You can see this trend here:
http://www.ohloh.net/p/compare?metric=Contributors&project_0=TWiki&proje...
Perhaps there is some fancy proprietary stuff now available for a fee layered upon
TWiki. That's great, for those into something like this. But core development has,
for all practical purposes, stopped.
Foswiki, meanwhile, moves from strength to strength, with a rekindled development
community. Twiki, Inc, should it survive its tumultuous birth (with what looks
like four marketers and two programmers from an admittedly distant view, this may
prove a challenge perhaps larger than all new VC-seeking companies face) may even want
to upgrade their core to Foswiki one day. Of course, they'll have to respect the GPL
if they do so, and share their code back. But text applications built using the Topic
Markup Language may of course remain proprietary. Again, if you're into that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, those seeking help on TWiki -- check out Foswiki. For most of the day, there
is an active IRC community (you can hear the crickets on the TWiki one).
Check them out: http://colas.nahaboo.net/twikiirc/
More details on the history: http://foswiki.org/About/WhyThisFork
Don,
I was unaware of this history, thanks for a great summary of what happened and where things are with various versions.