 So hello everybody our next speaker is Ludovic Dubost with the talk Supercharger collaboration with an open source wiki please give him a warm welcome. Hi everybody so I'm going to have a talk about an open source wiki so first who am I so I'm Ludovic Dubost I I created the xwiki software and I've been working on it for 12 years with the company that I created at the same time what we do is is fully open source our company has been bootstrapped and it's actually fully owned by its employees and it's actually a particularity and a choice that we made to not raise money or get outside money so that we can keep our independence and choose the way we do our business and doing open source in particularly the company has has around 2 million euros revenue today it's for close to 40 employees I'm promoting as much as I can and my time permits open source in France in particular and I have a special interest in ethical open source business so what I mean by that is I have this interest of how can you live from open source so not just do it in your free time but actually do it full-time all day long and and still as a business and being ethical and and respect your communities so xwiki is a wiki software for enterprises has many innovative features it it's based on bootstrap has bootstrap and is fully responsive we have done a lot of work on on usability especially in the in the last few years it's also a software that is available on the cloud so you can actually go to xwiki.com and create a wiki in in five minutes and try it on the cloud and then eventually use our services to host it but it's also open source and you can download it either on xwiki.com or xwiki.org and well we have a bit of recognition one of the big things that we achieved in the last few years is that Amazon decided to switch their media wiki to xwiki and and now our software is in production and is serving is serving a lot of pages at Amazon globally what's interesting is that company like Amazon tech companies have wikis at the heart they use wikis much more strongly than traditional companies would and that's actually quite interesting for us to have this type of recognition we're a bit trending so this shows about this is this shows our our install rates so actually the curve at the top is the install rate so this is over a couple years it shows our install rates per month and the the number at the bottom is actually showing the people that keep it more than 10 days so after trying it out and and keep it running and actually it doesn't show as well on this graph but we almost doubled the amount of people per per per months that keep the wiki keep the wiki running we have about 3000 active install in the world and we hope to continue to grow that fast and this is our total active install and what is interesting is that we have seen that with the with the changes that we made in this year we have actually accelerated install rates so we were kind of growing regularly progressively and now we're we're having more acceleration and we think that we can we can accelerate the number of installs of wikis in the world what's what's unique in xwiki so a few features I'd like to point out that are quite unique in xwiki and so this this one has actually been sponsored by Amazon and we introduced in xwiki what we call nested spaces and so basically we have a we we can make a tree of page and at any we can whenever we're on a page we can create sub pages and create a hierarchy of pages and we can put user rights at any at any place in the tree so user rights and configuration of the of the wiki screen at any place on the street that actually one of the things compared to media wiki that is quite powerful in xwiki is the possibility of having user rights at at any place in the tree and this is something that companies very often need a lot we also have something called page structuration so in xwiki you can not only have text pages but you can actually create pages that have metadata and what's interesting with that type of feature is that it gives you additional structure in your wiki so a good way of using xwiki and using using xwiki is that we you start by creating a lot of pages in wiki style but after after a while you realize that your your content lacks a bit of structure for example if you make pages about projects you will want to know who is the project manager and in xwiki you will be able to decide to use to use fields in your pages and there will still be wiki pages that mean they will they can still be linked with other other pages they can still have history still have comments and all that things but they can have structure and this allows you to have a better way to navigate in the information so we and this creates these type of screens where you can navigate your wiki pages by different metadata fields this is actually quite powerful and makes wikis also much more accessible to non-tech people because one of the things that we learned over the 12 years that tech people knows wikis very well but when you open wikis to non-tech people they have a hard time understanding how exactly it works and these type of features democratize much more the way wiki works wikis work and they at the same time they keep the wiki principle another thing is that we have a flexibility and programming inside the wiki so xwiki and that is something that where we compare with tools like conference that are used a lot we can control the UI a lot so if you want to change what's in the menu on the left and then you're at the top if you want to change the skin you can change it completely and you can actually do that through scripting inside the xwiki tool another thing is that you can you can use macros to script inside your wiki so if you want to go access external tools in your wiki you can write scripts using the groovy language you can write scripts to get the data from these other tools and bring them in your in your wiki for example we've done macros for elastic search or kibana we can we can show widgets from kibana or we can we can write scripts to call elastic search and see the results inside xwiki what I showed the graphs about xwiki trending data our install rates they come from an elastic search instance and they're shown inside our wiki so we navigate inside our wiki to look at our statistics and the data is coming from from kibana or elastic search another thing is that we have an extended API so you can access the data in the wiki from from anywhere outside with great APIs some other features we have templates so you can when you create the document you say plus document you have a whole choice of documents these can be text documents or these can be structured documents so if you define a structure for for let's say a project document you will have a template called project template and you do a plus you want to create you want to create a new document you choose just the type of document that you want create and you have easy to use templates to do that so this has been improved a lot in the latest version of xwiki to make it much more easier to use we also have PDF output so and this is something that people use a lot is that if you have created a lot of pages in your wiki you might want to share them so first you can share the pages that you create in PDF so export to PDF you can also do export to Word but what's interesting is that you can actually you can actually script to create to take all your pages and make a big PDF out of all your pages so this is actually quite interesting for documentation if you want to bring your documentation offline and we also do that for procedures we have projects with companies where we're doing procedure guides for for sales people or any other type of people in the company and they generate PDFs out of these sales guides we also have an extension repository with applications that in extensions that you can install so we have an upgrade system and we have also a bunch of collaborative applications that you you can add to xwiki all these collaborative applications they're built on top of the wiki model so every page that that any application in xwiki is creating is a wiki page it's just not a text wiki page it's a structured wiki page and it has history history one of the things that is quite interesting is that everything that is done in xwiki is historic that means you can roll it back at any moment even when it's even the preferences of the wiki you can actually roll them back to a previous version because everything's historic including the preferences of the wiki so now why why should you actually use xwiki so I want to point out these things that I already mentioned the flexibility the UI the structure that xwiki can bring to you you should also use xwiki because it's open source and we still use way too many tools in the developer community that are not open source and we probably should do that if we if we believe that open source should strive we also can get better support services actually if you purchase our support services compared to other to proprietary software it's not the same time of support you get you get actually people that help you so in our support services we go way beyond just telling people calling getting answers when people have problems we actually help them get get learn how to use the wiki better so actually our support services are cheaper than the price of the licenses of the of the proprietary software but our support services are actually much more advanced than what they are you can also use xwiki because you want to be nice and and you can use a actually not so good reason to use xwiki it's because it's free so when you have if you have difficulties bringing it in in your company the fact that it's free might be a way to bring it in but actually it shouldn't be a good reason for bringing open source software open source software should be brought in companies not because they are free but because they're they can be modified and because they're open source so actually I want to have this slide about open source versus proprietary because we have a bit of a paradox we're we're all we're all building open source the question is are we actually using open source when we're building open source and what I see is that well the thing is closed source companies they have a much bigger much bigger marketing and so they they get the software they do much more known one of the things we believe that we're we're we're not that difference our software is not that bad compared to the equivalent proprietary software the thing is it's what it's much less known and this is a lot to do with the marketing aspects and the lack of marketing and we also see closed source company they use a lot of open source software in their proprietary software but they actually don't contribute that much to that to that open source software now we know it's not easy to use not to use the mainstream software or or the very known software and I'm one of them because I have a Mac and and I know it's not easy to decide to switch you always have a glitch or something like that when you switch you need to get used to something new and it's not that easy to switch but at the same time if we want open source to be bigger I mean it's important to to help open source groups to complete their software if if the open source software that compete with the closed source software don't have the users and and don't have the services and the financing from these users they cannot make the open source software as good as a software companies that have a completely different model they put a lot of money at the beginning they make a great software and then they sell it a lot and then they they decide how it's going to evolve so and this is what we don't like when we're talking about open source at some point the closed source software has this problem of not evolving anymore because the company that sells this decides how to make it both and this is why I like to do open source software because I'd like that people can decide how to make it evolve somewhere so at some point we need to start somewhere and now the question so one of the things we talk a lot when we are at the booth that we get developers that come in the oh what do you use are we use conference and they say about but we didn't decide it so what I would like to tell you is that if your company is using proprietary software not necessarily only confidence if you want to convince them to use to use proprietary software what can you do so you can tell your boss that the software is free that that sometimes helps instead of paying you you can you can give references so for example in the case of xwiki you can tell them that high-profile companies are using that software in our case for example it's Amazon you can pitch the key advantages that the software have so try to learn what the key advantages of the open source software are compared to to the proprietary software and pitch that to your boss you can pitch the fact that you can do custom projects with that open source software so you can actually if the company has specific needs you can use that open source software to solve that specific need inside the company and that's an interesting way to bring open source software inside the companies you can pitch the support services I believe and I generally believe that the support services of open source companies like when there is a when our company is behind the open source software have much better support services than the proprietary equivalent and so you can pitch that level of services and tell that there are services like that that you can pitch anyway the last thing you can do is that if you if you want to convince them to use our wiki well give them my phone number give me their phone number of the of your boss and I'll try to convince them well how can you try xwiki you can download it on xwiki org you can also try it on the cloud so you go to xwiki com and you can try it in a couple of minutes you can also go to the xwiki playground and you can visit an instance of xwiki actually if you go to xwiki org or xwiki com they're both websites done with xwiki so they're you we're using our own software for these websites and that's the laptop going and I'm going to finish and so you can join the community and come help us thank you thanks a lot little week yeah we don't have time for questions but please meet little week outside for if you want to talk about xwiki