Twiki - Open Source Enterprise Wiki

In my last post on wiki applications, I mentioned that there are three types of wiki applications: public wiki, enterprise wiki, personal wiki. One of enterprise wiki is Twiki which is open source wiki. In my today's post, I am going to describe Twiki.

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration and web application platform. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project management system, a document management system, a knowledge base, a team portal or any other groupware tool, on an intranet, extranet or the Internet. Users without programming skills can create web applications.

Developers can extend the functionality of TWiki with plugins. Users can create wiki applications using the TWiki Markup Language. TWiki looks and feels like a normal Intranet or Internet web site. However it also has a Edit link at the bottom of every topic (web page); everybody can change a topic or add content by just using a browser. TWiki fosters information flow within an organization, lets distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively, and eliminates the one webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content.

TWiki has been downloaded over 500,000 times and is used daily by millions of people in over 100 countries. Some larger deployments have several 100,000 pages and over 10,000 users. TWiki is developed by an active open source community.

TWiki is installed on many web sites, mainly behind corporate firewalls. Many major companies use TWiki because it is very user friendly compared to some well established commercial groupware systems. Companies are deploying TWiki in different ways, and TWiki is quite flexible to adapt to different needs.

This is a non- comprehensive list of how TWiki is being used:

• to replace a static intranet. Content is maintained by the employees, thus eliminating the "one webmaster syndrome" of outdated and insufficient intranet content;
• as a knowledge base and FAQ system;
• to design and document software projects;
• to track issues (i.e. bugs) and features;
• as a document management tool;
• to collaborate on common goals;
• as a software archive, i.e. the TWiki Plugins archive;
• as a company internal message board, i.e. for job listings.

Twiki Major Features

• Any web browser: Edit existing pages or create new pages by using any web browser. There is no need for ftp or http put to upload pages.
• Edit link: to edit a page, simply click on the Edit link at the bottom of every page.
• Auto links: web pages are linked automatically. You do not need to learn HTML commands to link pages.
• Text formatting: simple, powerful and easy to learn text formatting rules. You write text like you would write an e-mail.
• Webs: Pages are grouped into TWiki webs (or collections). This allows you to set up separate collaboration groups.
• Search: full text search with/without regular expressions.
• E-mail notification: get automatically notified when something has changed in a TWiki web.
• Structured content: use TWiki forms to classify and categorize unstructured web pages and to create simple workflow systems.
• File attachments: upload and download any file as an attachment to a page by using your browser. This is similar to file attachments in an e-mail, but it happens on web pages.
• Revision control: all changes to pages and attachments are tracked. Retrieve previous page revisions and differences between them. Find out who changed what and when.
• Access control: define groups and impose fine grained read and write access permissions based on groups and users.
• Variables: use variables to dynamically compose your pages. This allows you to dynamically build a table of contents, include other pages or show a search result embedded in a page.
• TWiki Plugins: enhance the TWiki functionality with server side Plugin modules. Developers can create Perl Plugins using the TWiki Plugin API.
• Application Wiki: contributors use the TWiki platform to create web applications. The TWiki Variables, Plugins and sample applications offer a rich environment where domain-specific applications can be built efficiently by contributors with moderate skill sets. Developers can create new Plugins to enhance the functionality of TWiki even further.


Some example applications:
• Call Center Status Board: simple status board where time and person can be picked from a list.
• Change Request: generic change request application.
• Meeting Minutes: keep track of meeting minutes with action items.
• Search Book Titles: simple application to search a library of books.
• Simple FAQ: FAQ with all questions on one page and an automatic TOC.
• Templates and skins: a flexible templating system separates program logic and presentation. Skins overwrite template headers and footers; page content is unaffected.
• Managing pages: individual pages can be renamed, moved and deleted through the browser.
• Managing users: web based user registration and change of password.
• What's new: see recent changes of TWiki webs. The change log can also be exported in XML RSS format for news syndication.
• Statistics: create statistics of TWiki webs. Find out most popular pages and top contributors.
• Preferences: four levels of preferences: TWikiPreferences for site-level; WebPreferences for each web; user level preferences; and page level preferences.
• Conflict resolution: content is merged automatically if more than one user edits a page at the same time. In rare cases where a conflict cannot be resolved automatically, users are warned and guided to resolve the conflict manually.
• Referred-By: find out back-links to a page.

TWiki has a plugin API that has spawned over 400 extensions to link into databases, create charts, tags, sort tables, write spreadsheets, create image gallery and slideshows, make drawings, write blogs, plot graphs, interface to many different authentication schemes, track Extreme Programming projects and so on.

TWiki as a structured wiki provides database-like manipulation of fields stored on pages, and offers a SQL-like query language to embed reports in wiki pages. Wiki applications are also called situational applications because they are created ad-hoc by the users for very specific needs. Users have built TWiki applications that include call center status boards, to-do lists, inventory systems, employee handbooks, bug trackers, blog applications, discussion forums, status reports with rollups and more.

The interface of TWiki is completely skinnable in templates, themes and CSS. It includes support for internationalization with support for multiple character sets, UTF-8 URLs, and the user interface has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

TWiki is primarily used at the workplace as a corporate wiki to coordinate team activities, track projects, implement workflows and as an Intranet Wiki. The TWiki community estimates 40,000 corporate wiki sites as of March 2007, and 20,000 public TWiki sites. TWiki customers include Fortune 500 such as Disney, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Oracle Corporation and Yahoo!, as well as small and medium enterprises,such as ARM Holdings, and DHL. TWiki has also been used to create collaborative internet sites, such as the City of Melbourne's FutureMelbourne wiki where citizens can collaborate on the future plan.

TWiki is implemented in Perl. TWiki is a cgi-bin script written in Perl. It reads a text file, hyperlinks it and converts it to HTML on the fly.Wiki pages are stored in plain text files. Everything, including metadata such as access control settings, are version controlled using RCS. RCS is optional since an all-Perl version control system is provided. TWiki scales reasonably well even though it uses plain text files and no relational database to store page data. Many corporate TWiki installations have several hundred thousand pages and tens of thousands of users. Load balancing and caching can be used to improve performance on high traffic sites.

TWiki has database features built into the engine. A TWiki Form is attached to a page as metadata. This represents a database record. A set of pages that share the same type of form build a database table. A formatted search with a SQL-like query can be embedded into a page to construct dynamic presentation of data from multiple pages. This allows for building wiki applications and constitutes the TWiki's notion of a structured wiki.

Wiki Applications

Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning "fast" or "quick". Wiki applications is is collaborative software that runs a wiki. A wiki is a web site which users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wiki allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. Examples of wiki use include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and notetaking.

Main features of Wiki:

• Wiki users can edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki web site, using only a plain web browser without any extra add-ons. 
• Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not. 
• Wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the web site landscape.

Wiki enables users to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser. A single page in a wiki website is referred to as a wiki page, while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks, is the wiki. Wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.

A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Most wikis keep a record of changes made to wiki pages; often, every version of the page is stored. This means that authors can revert to an older version of the page, should it be necessary because a mistake has been made.

Within the text of most pages there are usually a large number of hypertext links to other pages. Wikis generally provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages. Users can create any number of index or table-of-contents pages, with hierarchical categorization or whatever form of organization they like. Most wikis have a backlink feature, which displays all pages that link to a given page. It is typical in a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the wiki.

Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is the Recent Changes page which is a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.

From the change log, other functions are accessible in most wikis: the revision history shows previous page versions and the diff feature highlights the changes between two revisions. Using the revision history, an editor can view and restore a previous version of the article. The diff feature can be used to decide whether or not this is necessary. A regular wiki user can view the diff of an edit listed on the "Recent Changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, consult the history, restoring a previous revision.

In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "recent changes" page, some wiki engines provide additional content control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly.

Some wikis also implement "patrolled revisions," in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark some edits as not vandalism. A "flagged revisions" system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed.

Most wikis offer at least a title search, and sometimes a full-text search. The scalability of the search depends on whether the wiki engine uses a database.

There are essentially three types of usage for wiki: public wikis with a potentially large community of readers and editors, enterprise wikis for data management by corporations and other organizations, and personal wikis, meant to be used by a single person to manage notes, and usually run on a desktop. Some wiki applications is specifically geared for one of the usage types, while other software can be used for all three, but contains functionality, either in its core or through plugins, that help with one or more of the usage types.

Public Wikis

Public wikis are wikis that can be read by anyone and they usually (though not always) can be edited by anyone as well with sometimes required registration. Among public wikis, MediaWiki is the major application. It is used for the most popular public wiki, Wikipedia, as well as for the most popular wiki farm, Wikia, and it is the most popular application in use on other public wikis as well. Other wiki engines used regularly for public wikis include MoinMoin and PmWiki, along with many others.

Enterprise Wikis

Enterprise wiki application is used in a corporate (or organizational) context, especially to enhance internal knowledge sharing, with a greater emphasis on features like access control, integration with other software, and document management.

Most wiki applications are enterprise solutions including Confluence, Socialtext, Jive Engage, SamePage, and Traction TeamPage. In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions including Foswiki which calls itself "free and open source enterprise collaboration platform", and TWiki, which calls itself "Open Source Enterprise Wiki". Some open source wiki applications, though they do not specifically call themselves as enterprise solutions, have marketing materials geared for enterprise users, like Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and MediaWiki. Many other wiki applications have also been used within enterprises.

Within organizations, wikis may either add to or replace centrally managed content management systems. Their decentralized nature allows them to disseminate needed information across an organization more rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository. Wikis can be used for document management, project management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and many other kinds of data management.

Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include:

• Allow to connect information using quick and easy to create pages containing links to other corporate information systems, like people directories, CMS and thus build up knowledge bases. 
• Avoiding e-mail overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden subscribers with many messages, regardless of relevance to particular subscribers. It is also very useful for the project manager to have all the communication stored in one place, which allows them to link the responsibility for every action taken to a particular team member. 
• Organizing information. Wikis allow users to structure new and existing information. As with content, the structure of data is sometimes also editable by users. 
• Building consensus. Wikis allow the structured expression of views disagreed upon by authors on a same page. This feature is very useful when writing documentation, preparing presentations and so on. 
• Access rights, roles. Users can be forbidden from viewing and/or editing given pages, depending on their department or role within the organization. 
• Knowledge management with comprehensive searches. This includes document and project management, as well as using a wiki as a knowledge repository useful during times of employee turnover, retirement and so on.

Personal Wikis

Application that is specifically designed for running personal wikis includes NotePub, Pimki and Tomboy. Other, more general, wiki applications have components geared for individual users, including MoinMoin, which offers a Desktop Edition.

Wiki applications can include features that come with traditional content management systems, such as calendars, tasks lists, blogs, and discussion forums. All of these can either be stored via versioned wiki pages, or simply be a separate piece of functionality. Applications that support blogs with wiki style editing and versioning is sometimes known as "bliki" software. Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is an example of wiki software that is designed to support such features at its core. Many of the enterprise wiki applications, such as TWiki, Confluence and SharePoint, also support such features, as do open source applications like MediaWiki and XWiki, via plugins.

Wiki software can let users store data via the wiki, in a way that can be exported via the Semantic Web, or queried internally within the wiki. A wiki that allows such annotation is known as a semantic wiki. The current best-known semantic wiki software is Semantic MediaWiki, a plugin to MediaWiki.

Case Study - Wind River - Twiki Information Architecture

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of re-structuring content and information architecture of a content management system based on Twiki in Wind River.

Wind River is a software engineering company that used Twiki as their content management system. TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, content management system, a knowledge base, or a team portal.

Content organization and information architecture in Twiki were such that users had difficulty in finding information they were looking for. This situation made it difficult to find, re-use, and update content.

This also discouraged further adding of the new content and thus created areas where no documentation existed and the knowledge instead of being shared was being stored in personal computers. Storing the content in personal computers presented a risk of it being lost because it was not backed-up.

There was a lot of obsolete content because no content owners have been formally identified and no retention schedule has been set up. Collaborative work on the documents and projects was accomplished by users sending links to Twiki pages. Without these links it was very difficult to find information. There was no information governance in place and so content management processes were very sporadic.

The task was to re-organize the content organization and information architecture of the system and to set up information governance to solve these problems.

I strongly believe in user-centered design, so I performed the users study. I identified stakeholders within each Wind River team and created the questionnaire for collecting users' requirements for the system re-organization and the usability issues.

Based on these requirements, I re-organized the content structure and information architecture of the system. The major key to this re-organization was that the structure is very simple and intuitive. I made navigation very simple, created very intuitive labels, made sure that there is not too much information on one page and a user does not have to scroll down a very long page, that each page has a correct breadcrumb, and created taxonomy of webs (the building blocks of Twiki). Based on this taxonomy, I re-organized the location of documents. I also enhanced the system search.

For each content type, document owners were identified and retention schedule was set up with the function to flag the content that would reach an expiration date according to the retention schedule. This flag function would send an email notification to the content administrator that a certain document reached an expiration date. This alert allowed the content administrator to contact the document owner for the decision on what should be done with this document: review and update, move to an archive, or delete.

User acceptance testing of the system was performed. Users were satisfied with the system's new information architecture and indicated that it became much easier to find information.

The system with new content structure and information architecture was deployed.

Information governance was set up. Group and individual training was conducted on ongoing basis.

The project was a success. Company management and users were very cooperative in helping to make this project a success. It helped to increase efficiency and productivity and thus saved Wind River cost because employees did not waste any time on searching for documents or recreating documents that already exist.

Lessons learned

1. User-centered design is paramount to the project success. When you design and build the system based on users’ requirements, they are going to use it. Users have the sense of ownership of the system which provides excellent starting point. They know that the system you are building will be what they need.

2. Top-down support is critical for the project success. Management support is a huge factor in employees' encouragement to use the system and in setting up and enforcing procedures for information governance.

3. Assurance of users from the very beginning that they will not be left alone with the system provided their cooperation.

4. User acceptance testing helped to encourage employees to start using the system. When they participate in this process, this gives them the feeling of ownership of the system.

5. Ongoing training after the system deployment with the new content structure and information architecture made user adoption smooth.

SharePoint - Wiki Sites

In addition to document management features, SharePoint has collaboration features. One of them is the ability to create wiki pages. This is how it looks:

Word "wiki" comes from Hawaiian word "wiki wiki" which means “fast”. A wiki is a site that is designed for groups of people to quickly capture and share ideas by creating simple pages and linking them together. After someone creates a page, another team member can add more content, edit the content, or add supporting links.

Because team members can edit wiki pages without any special editing tools, wikis are a good tool for brainstorming and collecting information from several people. Team members can easily create links to pages for someone to finish creating later, or link to existing pages, without having to struggle with long Web addresses.

Creating a wiki site is similar to creating any other type of site. You specify the site name, choose a wiki as the type of site, and then specify who will have access to your site.

Creating a wiki site is the same as creating any other type of site. You specify the site name, choose a wiki as the type of site, and then specify who will have access to this site. Before creating this site, be sure that you are at the location where you want this site to be located.

Then under "Site Actions", choose "Sites and Workspaces", and then "Create". After this you would select "Enterprise Wiki" and proceed entering the data for your new wiki site just like you would do for a regular site:

To edit any wiki page, click "Edit" on the page, proceed editing the page, and click "save" when you are done.

You can create links from one page to another to pages. To do this, click "edit", go to the place where you would like to have this link, and insert the name of the page, surrounded by double square brackets: [[Page Name]]. For example, to insert a link to a page called "Planner Demos," type [[Planner Demos]]. The link will be created when you save the page:

You can also create links pages that don't exist yet. This will be just a placeholer link and will look like [...] Later on, you can click on dots and create a new page and then enter text instead of dots.

You can add other items to a wiki site, such as a tasks list to track action items or tasks related to the wiki. You can choose whether or not the list or library appears on the Quick Launch for the wiki.

As you can see, a wiki site is a really good tool for brainstorming, like a white board, where team members can write their ideas.