You described the situation almost exactly, including that the database
explanation, at least so far, has been ignored. The only difference is
while the majority of engineers approved it after the demo, the managers in
charge did not. I'm almost out of gas on this one, it's been months, and
the outcome was unexpected.
From: Neill Mitchell [mailto:ne...@nlkmitchell.com]
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 12:45 PM
To: semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [SMW-devel] Big problem with SMW/MW versus Foswiki
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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