Item: XWiki
Rating: 10
Author: Stéphane Laurière

Overall Satisfaction with XWiki Collaboration Suite

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

XWiki Collaboration Suite (XCS) is used across the whole OW2 organization and the OW2 community. XCS is also one of the key components on top of which OW2 is implementing its Quality Program Platform. XCS addresses two types of issues: collaboration related issues, and application development ones. On the collaboration side, XWiki makes it seamless to create and evolve collaborative knowledge bases. On the development side, XCS provides a rich API and a large number of extensions speeding up considerably the development of powerful Web applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.