Hi.
In a word - MySQL. How would SMW's query engine work with foswiki's flat
file "database"? You need a database engine capable of handling SQL
queries. You would think that was evidence enough, but unfortunately you
are dealing with non technical people, so you are wasting your time
presenting technical reasons.
I had exactly this at the last company I worked for. As you are dealing
with non technical people, the best way is to play politics with
politics. You'll never beat them with technical argument. A practical
demonstration is called for. Show the key decision maker all the
information in your SMW instance and how easy it is to write a query to
leverage that information and display it in a meaningful way. Then show
them the foswiki which will have none of that functionality.
You need to demonstrate the usefulness of the information in your SMW
wiki and how it benefits the business and how the efficiency of the
business will be compromised if the information is effectively lost.
This worked for me and the largest handset manufacturer in the world
switched from twiki to Mediawiki :)
Good luck!
Regards
Neill.
On 27/01/12 17:37, Sal Quintanilla wrote:
Hi Folks,
I've created a pretty amazing SMW intranet installation for our
engineering department. Without spending too much time describing it,
at the high level it
-Promotes reusability though automatic cross-referencing and
advertising of content
-Uses forms and templates to support symmetric looking page types
(like project pages, technical articles, status reports, user profile
pages) while still including free text for customization of information
-Includes parametric search based on several families of tags that are
attached to almost everything
It's been evolving and running for over a year, has a few thousand
meaningful articles, and has been well-received by our engineering
community.
We also have a foswiki installation. It started as twiki more than 7
years ago and was migrated to foswiki about a year ago. The foswiki
install is on an IT-managed server and is the official corporate wiki.
In an effort to streamline operations, the decision has been made to
scrap our SMW server. For the most part, the decision makers used the
point that SMW is a wiki, foswiki is a wiki, foswiki is already
adopted, we'll use foswiki. The infrastructure I added was
essentially deemed insignificant in the arguments (non-engineers made
this assessment, I couldn't convince them otherwise after a year of
trying, nor could other engineers). However, they did say that my
designs could be handed to our foswiki team and adapted to it.
I'm writing to the developer list to ask for insights into why foswiki
can or cannot support such a system. I know it supports forms and
templates, but I have my doubts about the rich query support I'm
doing, given that foswiki uses text files for storage and its own core
for access, while Mediawiki uses a database and lets the mysql process
do a lot of work for it. What I don't have is real evidence. Does
anyone have any empirical or other statements for why such a transfer
can't take place?
Thanks guys.
Sal
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