Socialtext (discontinued) vs. XWiki

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

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

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• 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.

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

• 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.

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

XWiki key differentiators in my opinion:

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

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions

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