Igloo vs. XWiki Collaboration Suite

Igloo is a well-suited option for teams/companies that want to build an employee intranet with some other interesting features, like file storage and sharing, internal communications, and resource and knowledge management. All of these features may help your workers increase productivity significantly by centralizing everything in one robust and reliable platform. However, it can be less appropriate if costs are a problem for you, due to the pricing. So, if you will not be using several features and just want an intranet for you company, you may want to go with another solution.

Incentivized

XWiki is very well suited for a very wide range of web collaboration and web development.

• Notifications: Igloo can push email updates to users.
• Organization: Igloo allows for you to create pages, sub pages, and many layer deep sections. You can also organize the layout of your pages.
• Versioning: it's super easy to reserve and edit documents for offline use. And you can see who last edited a document and when.
• Offline access: there's a desktop version you can use very easily. It's really good for dropping a bunch of files at once.

Incentivized

• XWiki makes it easy to manage semi-structured information, which is at the heart of every knowledge nexus of organizations. It makes it easy to manage in a single system both structured data (such as memberships, projects), and unstructured data.
• XWiki offers a very rich API for creating enterprise applications quickly that are easy to maintain and evolve collaboratively.
• XWiki templating and skinning system is extremely flexible and powerful.

• Their UI is not used-friendly. Their use of Igloo-specific terminology made it difficult to understand how each function of the site worked. They would repeatedly say, for example, "a ___ is really a ___" vs. just calling it what the function actually is.
• Implementation was a far cry from their sales support. After basically nickel-and-diming you for everything, they - very poorly - cap your use of their implementation support team.
• Overall, Igloo didn't work for our organization because they do multiple things decently vs a few things excellently. The experience with Igloo was unremarkable.

Incentivized

• While the basic pieces are available for turning XWiki into an advanced semantic system, some features could be made available more prominently to the user for easing the use of faceted and typed links, paving the way for a new era of collaborative knowledge sharing.

Easy to use, cost-effective, and benefit in organizational culture development and information sharing across various employees and from higher management. Great customer support and continuous development to make the software better for users. It allows better collaboration with a little bit of fun too and requires less resources to handle.

Incentivized

XWiki key differentiators in my opinion:

• Fast app development framework with very rich API
• Open-source strategy, opening the way to collaborative innovation

• Helps with employee retention - especially in a virtual environment.
• Costs less than a separate wiki system for storing key information.

Incentivized

• XWiki has a positive impact on the OW2 communication and collaborations strategies. It saves time when developing applications.