Lotus QuickPlace is another contender against TWiki. Can anyone provide any selection criteria or commentary as to when to use TWiki and when to use Quickplace? Thanks. (I still intend to use TWiki for my sites but at work I need to have solid justification).

-- MartinCleaver - 30 May 2001

Looks like "TWiki Designed By Committee" to me. I read through the Users Guide and tried to discern how to create a page for discussion (like a Topic). The steps you'd have to go through are mind-numbing. I'd rather have my nuts pounded flat with a wooden mallet than use something like that.

-- DavidWeller - 31 May 2001

He he. As much as I might agree with you, I somehow suspect that my firm will require something a little more quantifyable as a justification :^)

-- MartinCleaver - 01 Jun 2001

Here are some of the justifications we have used when going head-to-head with LiveLink (not the same thing at all, I know, but may help):

1. Performance (10-12X faster on the global intranet, low bandwidth)

2. Shallow learning curve - even managers can learn

3. Low maintenance

but most important when talking to senior managers with budgets

4. Low cost

-- CrawfordCurrie - 01 Jun 2001

I think I have to do it on the basis of features, especially as my firm has a global licence that allows us to use any LotusNotes type product. Shallow learning curve is a sticking point because my users keep saying they want to at least use keyboard shortcuts rather than markup to do bullets, bold, italic etc. (I'd insert a cross-reference but I don't remember the name of the topic).

-- MartinCleaver - 01 Jun 2001

I had a quick look at http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/quickplace and it appears very feature-rich - offline working, rich text in the browser, etc. I think TWiki's major benefits vs this sort of tool are:

• Simple tool - easy to get up and running in an afternoon or less, simple to understand, shallow learning curve
• Powerful - anything you can do in a web page (just about) can be done in Twiki
• Easy to update - avoid the 'dead intranet site' syndrome
• Browser independent - useful if you have any Unix or Mac users out there who may have problems with heavily IE-tied tools
• Easy to administer - doesn't require much admin attention
• Customisable - a big win if you want to integrate with other web-based applications (e.g. I'm planning on a 'bug:1234' type extension to WikiSyntax that would create a link to a bug tracking DB entry).
  • [ AndreaSterbini ] now you can use the InterwikiPluginEarlyDev for that.
• Open source - evolving rapidly, with improvements coming from world wide community of developers - likely to win in the long term, for the same reason that Apache and Linux are doing well these days.

-- RichardDonkin - 01 Jun 2001

Here's the criteria that we are looking at at present. To me the sticking points are in two places: Off-line access and Ease-of-use.

• Document Management - online storage, routing and version-control, search and index facilities
• Project Management - shared calendars, to do lists and schedules
• Ideas management - discussion groups and real-time chat
• Universal access - access via a simple web browser, viewers for major software applications, access permissions control
• Communication - contact lists, email notification of events, email reception
• Off-line functionality - can the workspace be replicated, edited off-line, synchronised to online master
• Cost - available on an ASP (rented) basis, resource requirements
• Ease of Use - intuitive look and feel, online help

Also, a sticking point is that some administration still needs to be done on the server. If I am to give TWiki to our ops guys the only access I get is via the browser. Therefore, this doesn't work for templates (WebBasedTemplateMaintenance) and doesn't work for creating new webs.

-- MartinCleaver - 01 Jun 2001

Just as another point. My company is going through the same gyrations. We need to pick a KM/collaboration tool that we can use to create a portal that is useful for project and client relationships. Regardless of how powerful TWiki is, the decision makers will base decisions on a lot of things, with "How Pretty Does It Look?" being high on the list. Too many people assume Nice to look at = Easy to Use. Sad, but that's life in the corporate world. Let me raise a couple of points, Martin, just to help:

• Licensing: Looks like Lotus stuff vs TWiki is a wash on cost, so I'd rule that one out
• Training: Time to learn TWiki for even the most brain-damaged: 1 hour. Time to learn QuickPlace, probably a few days for most people, let's say 32 hours. Now multiply that by the number of people in your company
• Integration: Sorry, guys, IBM/Lotus has more marketing, more muscle, etc in the corporate world. Can you say "Seamless Office 2000 integration"? QuickPlace has it.

I could go on, but my point here is summarized this way: TWiki is an excellent tool for informal collaboration. Free wheeling thought shaped by a collection of people with similar goals and background (not AT ALL like the corporate world :-). Corporations want much more structure, and TWiki (hopefully) will never force the kind of structure that commercial collaboration tools have.

Want an even briefer analogy?

Commercial Collaboration Tools = Ballroom, TWiki = Mosh Pit :-)

-- DavidWeller - 01 Jun 2001

You know, MsOfficeIntegration, ReadWriteOfflineWiki and HtmlEditor would all help.

But, I have a feeling that where TWiki really could win is in implementing the SemanticWeb, really low-level sharing of terms and definitions.

-- MartinCleaver - 01 Jun 2001

I guess that BetterSkins is a good starting point to achieve that Pretier Look. Also check PlasticAndEverything2vsTWiki.

At my site they are suggesting yet another tool: Team Wave.

-- EdgarBrown - 01 Jun 2001

TWikiDeployment is the new meeting place to discuss deployment questions.

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Jun 2001

There are some useful pages on Ward's wiki site that already cover Everything2 (see Wiki:EveryThing ), Wiki:SlashDot, and Wiki:LotusNotes (includes some info on QuickPlace). Also, Meatball Wiki has a page on MeatBall:LotusNotes .

[ Update: Plugins.Plugins.InterwikiPluginEarlyDev has now been enabled, updated the links above to use this. Note that the syntax is a bit unforgiving, so avoid punctuation next to Wiki:InterWiki type links. -- RD, 10 June 2001 ]

-- RichardDonkin - 02 Jun 2001

We gave QuickPlace a quick try. Main results are:

• Pro
  • Really impressive JavaScript wysiwyg editor. There are several gimmicks, like on the fly creation of Graphic Text (several fonts, drop shadow, blur, ...) or a menu based selection of text color.
  • Sequential guidance for the user what to do next (1. do this, 2. do this, ...)
  • Complete browser based administration
  • You don't need to know Perl or HTML to be able to customize
• Con
  • Uses ActiveX controls. File upload (not only attachments, also topic upload), and several other tasks are done this way. This aspect limits the client side to Microsoft based products, you cannot use QuickPlace with other browsers except IE, and only on Windows platforms.
  • The editor and probably other features are only available when the use of ActiveX is enabled.
  • Security aspect: The ActiveX controls are signed by Lotus. But they need all possible privileges on the local system. I was not able to install these controls with my normal user privilege on NT in our environment.
  • If you don't like to enable AxtiveX/Java you don't have access to easy text formating. The topic text is then ASCII, but you could use HTML markup.
  • The is some sort of version control, not really transparent.
• Conclusion
  • Acceptable only for homogenic working groups, based on MS products
  • Not suitable for heterogenic networks with different browsers and operating systems at the client side.

-- HubertWeikert - 27 Jun 2001

Just a few (non-technical) points:

• Lotus Notes/Domino is being hit hard by Microsoft Exchange in the enterprise market. Capabilities such as Active Directory are making it increasingly difficult for corporates to justify having Lotus in the mix (and most are not about to dump Microsoft!).
• To the corporate mind, one viable argument is that only Microsoft and Open Source will have any viability in the long term (I guess Java will make it too - but projects like JBOSS make Java look more and more like open source). Developing/deploying/investing in solutions that are built on proprietary, non-Microsoft platforms (ie Notes) is not really the flavour of the month.
• No-one is going to decide to switch to Lotus because it is better wiki than TWiki (even if it were!) - it comes with way too much baggage and implications.
• Lotus is old: TWiki is new. Implementing a wiki is a great way to open the minds of a user community - adding a new service to an existing Notes deployment is going to make most users yawn.

-- SteveRoe - 02 Jul 2001

Here is a feature walkthrough of QuickPlace:

• http://www.lotus.com/products/qplace.nsf/allpublic/B26EC852B4487C13852568EB000F2EEA?opendocument

-- MartinCleaver - 11 Jul 2001

I saw a news article that Lotus might just have gone the way of the dodo, at least as a distinct entity under the IBM umbrella. I'd be careful that Lotus <anything> might not be on the "OS/2 skids".

-- DavidLeBlanc - 12 Jul 2001

Just my 2 euros worth. There is a middle way, we wrote our own wiki using Notes and a couple of Java agents. Have a look at http://www.emconnect.com. Interestingly it also didn't prove too difficult to create a native Notes wiki using the client. It certainly makes linking a whole lot easier.

-- MarkLawson - 1 Aug 02