Supercharge your collaboration with an Open Source Wiki
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| License | CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
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00:00
Open sourceCollaborationismConfluence (abstract rewriting)Scripting languageInstallation artMacro (computer science)Bit rateNumberElasticity (physics)CollaborationismWikiMultiplication signAxiom of choiceClosed setType theoryPattern recognitionBitComputer programmingCurveMenu (computing)Data structureWeb pageProjective planeHypermediaProduct (business)MetadataFormal languageContent (media)Different (Kate Ryan album)InformationTouchscreenNetwork topologyRight angleData managementField (computer science)SoftwareConfiguration spaceOpen sourceHierarchyGraph (mathematics)Uniqueness quantificationInstance (computer science)StatisticsSpacetimeMathematicsResultantBootstrap aggregatingUsabilityPoint cloudGreatest elementService (economics)GUI widgetForcing (mathematics)Level (video gaming)Data storage deviceLeakComa BerenicesEnterprise architectureRule of inferenceTemplate (C++)Principal idealGraph (mathematics)Key (cryptography)Arithmetic meanXML
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Open setComputer wormSoftware developerOpen sourceSoftwareVideoconferencingLattice (order)WikiCartesian coordinate systemCollaborationismClosed setOnline helpGroup actionService (economics)Goodness of fitBitParadoxSlide ruleMultiplication signWeb pageMoment (mathematics)Revision controlData structureWordScripting languageFunction (mathematics)Probability density functionEndliche ModelltheorieTemplate (C++)Electronic program guideType theoryExtension (kinesiology)Repository (publishing)Physical systemNumberPoint cloudProjective planeInstance (computer science)WebsiteLaptopSoftware industryProcedural programmingEquivalence relationLevel (video gaming)Boss CorporationCASE <Informatik>Mixed realityKey (cryptography)Point (geometry)Process (computing)Profil (magazine)Different (Kate Ryan album)Proper mapNormal (geometry)CausalityBuildingGraph coloringFreewareTelecommunicationCellular automaton
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Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
So, hello everybody, our next speaker is Ludovic Dubost with the talk, Supercharge Your Collaboration with an Open Source Wiki. Please give him a warm welcome.
00:25
Hi everybody, so I'm going to have a talk about an open source wiki, XWiki. So first, who am I? So, I'm Ludovic Dubost, I created the XWiki software and I've been working on it for twelve
00:40
years with the company that I created at the same time. What we do is fully open source. Our company has been bootstrapped and it's actually fully owned by its employees and it's actually a particularity and a choice that we made to not raise money or get outside
01:01
money so that we can keep our independence and choose the way we do our business and doing open source in particular. The company has around 2 million euros revenue to date for close to 40 employees. I'm promoting as much as I can and my time permits open source in France in particular
01:22
and I have a special interest in ethical open source business, so what I mean by that is I have this interest of how can you live from open source, so not just do it in your free time but actually do it full time all day long and still as a business and
01:42
being ethical and respect your communities. So XWiki is a wiki software for enterprises, has many innovative features, it's based on Bootstrap, has Bootstrap and is fully responsive. We have done a lot of work on usability especially in the last few years.
02:04
It's also a software that is available on the cloud, so you can actually go to XWiki.com and create a wiki in five minutes and try it on the cloud and then eventually use our services to host it, but it's also open source and you can download it either
02:20
on XWiki.com or on XWiki.org. And while we have a bit of recognition, one of the big things that we achieved in the last few years is that Amazon decided to switch their media wiki to XWiki and now our software is in production and is serving a lot of pages at Amazon globally.
02:44
What's interesting is that companies like Amazon tech companies have wikis at their own companies and that's actually quite interesting for us to have this type of recognition. We're a bit trending, so this shows our install rate, so actually the curve at the
03:03
top is the install rate, so this is over a couple of years and it shows our install rates per month and the number at the bottom is actually showing the people that keep it more than 10 days, so after trying it out and keep it running and actually it doesn't
03:22
show as well on this graph, but we almost doubled the amount of people per month that keep the wiki running. We have about 3,000 active installs in the world and we hope to continue to grow that
03:40
fast. This is our total active install and what is interesting is that we have seen that with the changes that we made this year, we have actually accelerated install rates, so we were kind of growing regularly progressively and now we're having more acceleration and we
04:03
think that we can accelerate the number of installs of wikis in the world. What's unique in XWiki? So a few features I'd like to point out that are quite unique in XWiki and so this one has actually been sponsored by Amazon and we're introduced in XWiki what we
04:21
call nested spaces and so basically we can make a tree of page and whenever we're on a page we can create sub pages and create a hierarchy of pages and we can put user rights at any place in the tree. So user rights and configuration of the wiki screen at any place in the tree.
04:43
That's actually one of the things compared to MediaWiki that is quite powerful in XWiki is the possibility of having user rights at any place in the tree and this is something that companies very often need a lot. We also have something called page structuration.
05:02
So in XWiki you can not only have text pages but you can actually create pages that have metadata and what's interesting with that type of feature is that it gives you additional structure in your wiki. So a good way of using XWiki and using XWiki is that you start by creating a lot
05:21
of pages in wiki style but after a while you realize that your content lacks a bit of structure. For example if you make pages about projects you will want to know who is the project manager and in XWiki you will be able to decide to use fields in your pages and there will still be wiki pages. That means they can still be linked with other pages.
05:43
They can still have history, still have comments and all that things but they can have structure and this allows you to have a better way to navigate in the information. So this creates these type of screens where you can navigate your wiki pages by different metadata fields. This is actually quite powerful and makes wikis also much more accessible to non tech
06:04
people because one of the things that we learned over the 12 years that tech people knows wikis very well but when you open wikis to non tech people they have a hard time understanding how exactly it works and these type of features democratize much more the way wikis work and at the same time they keep the wiki principle.
06:25
Another thing is that we have flexibility and programming inside the wiki. So XWiki and that is something that where we compare with tools like conference that are used a lot. We can control the UI a lot so if you want to change what's in the menu on the left
06:41
and then you're at the top if you want to change the skin you can change it completely and you can actually do that through scripting inside the XWiki tool. Another thing is that you can use macros to script inside your wiki. So if you want to go access external tools in your wiki you can write scripts using the groovy language.
07:00
You can write scripts to get the data from these other tools and bring them in your wiki. For example we've done macros for elastic search or kibana. We can show widgets from kibana or we can write scripts to call elastic search and see the results inside XWiki. What I showed the graphs about XWiki trending data.
07:23
Our install rates they come from an elastic search instance and they're shown inside our wiki. So we navigate inside the wiki to look at our statistics and the data is coming from kibana or elastic search. Another thing is that we have an extended API so you can access the data in the wiki
07:42
from anywhere outside with great APIs. Some other features we have templates. So when you create a document you say plus document you have a whole choice of documents. These can be text documents or these can be structured documents. So if you define a structure for let's say a project document you will have a template
08:03
called project template and you do a plus. You want to create a new document you choose the type of document that you want to create and you have easy to use templates to do that. So this has been improved a lot in the latest version of XWiki to make it much more easier to use. We also have PDF output and this is something that people use a lot is that if you have
08:25
created a lot of pages in your wiki you might want to share them. So first you can share the pages that you create in PDF. So export to PDF you can also do export to Word. But what's interesting is that you can actually script to take all your pages and make a big
08:41
PDF out of all your pages. So this is actually quite interesting for documentation if you want to bring your documentation offline. And we also do that for procedures. We have projects with companies where we're doing procedure guides for sales people or any other type of people in the company and they generate PDFs out of the sales guide.
09:04
We also have an extension repository with applications and extensions that you can install. So we have an upgrade system and we have also a bunch of collaborative applications that you can add to XWiki. All these collaborative applications they're built on top of the wiki model. So every page that any application in XWiki is creating is a wiki page.
09:25
It's just not a text wiki page. It's a structured wiki page and it has history, full history. One of the things that is quite interesting is that everything that is done in XWiki is history. That means you can roll it back at any moment. Even the preferences of the wiki you can actually roll them back to a previous version
09:43
because everything is history including the preferences of the wiki. So now why should you actually use XWiki? So I want to point out these things that I already mentioned, the flexibility, the UI, the structure that XWiki can bring to you. You should also use XWiki because it's open source and we still use way too many tools
10:03
in the developer community that are not open source. And we probably should do that if we believe that open source should strive. You also can get better support services. Actually, if you purchase our support services compared to other, to proprietary software, it's not the same time of support you get.
10:22
You get actually people that help you. So in our support services we go way beyond just getting answers when people have problems. We actually help them learn how to use the wiki better. So actually our support services are cheaper than the price of the licenses of the proprietary
10:43
software, but our support services are actually much more advanced than what they are. You can also use XWiki because you want to be nice, and you can use an actually not so good reason to use XWiki is because it's free. So if you have difficulties bringing it in in your company, the fact that it's free
11:04
might be a way to bring it in, but actually it shouldn't be a good reason for bringing open source software. Open source software should be brought in companies not because they're free, but because they can be modified and because they're open source. So actually I want to have this slide about open source versus proprietary, because we
11:25
have a bit of a paradox. We're all building open source. The question is are we actually using open source when we're building open source? And what I see is that, well, the thing is closed source companies, they have a much bigger marketing, and so they get the software, they do much more known.
11:44
One of the things we believe that we're not that different, our software is not that bad compared to the equivalent proprietary software. The thing is it's much less known, and this has a lot to do with the marketing aspects and the lack of marketing. We also see closed source companies, they use a lot of open source software in their
12:04
proprietary software, but they actually don't contribute that much to that open source software. We know it's not easy to use the mainstream software or the very known software, and I'm one of them because I have a Mac, and I know it's not easy to decide to switch.
12:23
You always have a glitch or something like that. When you switch, you need to get used to something new, and it's not that easy to switch. But at the same time, if we want open source to be bigger, it's important to help open source groups to complete their software. If the open source software that compete with the closed source software don't have
12:42
the users and don't have the services and the financing from these users, they cannot make the open source software as good as software companies that have a completely different model. They put a lot of money at the beginning, they make a great software, and then they sell it a lot, and then they decide how it's going to evolve.
13:02
This is what we don't like when we're talking about open source. At some point, the closed source software has this problem of not evolving anymore because the company that sells it decides how to make it evolve. This is why I like to do open source software, because I like that people can decide how to make it evolve somewhere.
13:22
At some point, we need to start somewhere. Now, the question, one of the things we talk a lot when we are at a booth, that we get developers that come and, oh, what do you use? Oh, we use Conferencing. They say, but we didn't decide it. What I would like to tell you is that if your company is using proprietary software, not
13:42
necessarily only Conferencing, if you want to convince them to use proprietary software, what can you do? You can tell your boss that the software is free. That sometimes helps instead of paying. You can give references. For example, in the case of XWiki, you can tell them that high-profile companies
14:01
are using that software. In our case, for example, it's Amazon. You can pitch the key advantages that these software have. Try to learn what the key advantages of the open source software are compared to the proprietary software and pitch that to your boss. You can pitch the fact that you can do custom projects with that open source software.
14:20
If the company has specific needs, you can use that open source software to solve that specific need inside the company. That's an interesting way to bring open source software inside the companies. You can pitch the support services. I genuinely believe that the support services of open source companies, like when our company
14:40
is behind the open source software, have much better support services than the proprietary equivalent. You can pitch that level of services and tell that there are services like that that you can pitch. The last thing you can do is that if you want to convince them to use our wiki, give them my phone number. Give me their phone number of your boss, and I'll try to convince them.
15:03
Well, how can you try XWiki? You can download it on XWiki.org. You can also try it on the cloud. You go to XWiki.com, and you can try it in a couple of minutes. You can also go to the XWiki playground, and you can visit an instance of XWiki. Actually, if you go to XWiki.org or XWiki.com, they're both websites done with XWiki.
15:22
So we're using our own software for these websites. And that's the laptop going. And I'm going to finish. And so you can join the community and come help us. Thanks a lot, Ludwig. We don't have time for questions, but please meet Ludwig outside if you want to talk about XWiki.