Hi again, Thanks for taking the time to explain. See below for one comment.
On Mar 9, 2011, at 10:49 AM, jstoldt wrote: > Hi Vincent, > > Regarding the download page, this looks like really nice progress. Listing > consulting firms there is also a nice and handy approach. Not listing > non-contributing firms is a very legit and understandable thing from a > development community POV. However, I was actually not pointing at how it is > hard to find supporting firms, I was much more pointing at how few there are > around and how many support Confluence. What XWiki should try, one way or > another, is to make more companies support XWiki. The major problems here > are that many consulting firms do not have a lot of man-power so they have > to focus on a smaller portfolio to keep up with the work load. Also, it is > self-explanatory that more consultants and consulting firm will cause the > market to be a lot more competitive. Still, I believe that if more support > is available more customers will use it, more feedback and requests will be > generated toward those consultants and, hopefully, they will actually start > contributing in public. > > About the whole VM business, I understand that this is getting ever more > important these days but I am not a real fan of the ready to go VM. I > considered this in my internship for another software I looked into and then > figured out the only two ways to run the VM was to use either a commercial > version of some VM software or to go with the VMWare Player which didn't > really sound appropriate for production either. In the end I installed XWiki > on a virtual instance of MS Windows Server 2008 R2 with a MS SQL Server 2008 > R2 database within the cloud of the IT company that manages the whole IT > business for the company. This setup would at least only require the web > server/servlet container and XWiki WAR to be maintained from somebody other > than the IT folks. The point being that VMs are nice in a small environment > where the structures are small and clear or even just local. But as soon as > it goes into larger business there is bound to be more trouble than just > upload and run a pre-built VM. > > You are right that you need feedback from technical users on what > configurations and so forth and I tried giving and adding such information > over the past few months. However, my point was that it should simply be > easier to use. I discussed this with Caleb last night and he had this idea > about some sort of wizard which sounds like exactly the thing I was thinking > about. Collect the necessary information on configurations and such from the > user and build it into a tiny tool that helps configuring a ready-to-use > productive environment. You talking about this: http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-1761 ? :) Thanks -Vincent > The Extension Manager sounds really nice and I believe you will be able to > make great things happen with it. Still, this seems to be more of a top > level back-end framework that will ease integration with other software, > features and so forth. What I was talking about, however, was that XWiki > could greatly benefit from working more closely with other de facto company > standards. I already mentioned MS Sharepoint Server integration, although > admittedly, I never got around checking out what Atlassian offers there in > detail. Another thing I could think of would be to use XWiki somehow more > closely along with Lotus Notes. For instance, my former company had some > workflows which were spread among SAP and Lotus Notes and I believe there > are use cases where an integration with XWiki would be benefitial, like > reusing data stored in a Lotus Notes database and view it in a nicer fashion > in XWiki. IMO a lot of engineering and design departments can make great use > of wiki software in general but what they need even more nowadays is a > Product Data Management system. So why not see if there are ways to > integrate XWiki in PTC Windchill, Dassault Systemes ENOVIA, SAP PLM or > Siemens PLM Software? This is obviously very technical with a very focused > market but I believe these could be great selling points, especially if > patronages or collaborations with some of the major PDM/PLM vendors can be > established. > > About updating, what I would really love to see would be sort of update > packages. I know this will increase the workload for the release manager but > I think creating minimal packages that only update necessities in an > automated fashion will lower the threshold for people being comfortable with > updating even if they have little idea of what they are doing. Also, a > stricter separation between setting storage pages and code pages would be > neat. I do not know if this is possible but what I could imagine to be great > would be to stop shipping documents like WebPreferences or XWikiPreferences > and instead make code documents that will automatically create those > documents with defaulted settings (like they are now in the shipped > documents) from code if they do not already exist. It would also be neat to > have settings like "hide full email address" not in the code file but in a > central place so it will not be overwritten accidentally. In general, I > think it would help to have configurable "hard settings" in extra properties > and on upgrade check if the value was manually set. If they are set they are > ignored and not overwritten, if they are not set just use the default > defined in the code. One example for that, the recently modified panel shows > only 5 entries, I preferred to show 10, so it would be neat to just have a > property in the document that is empty on shipment. When a user views the > panel the code checks the property and if it is empty it uses the default 5 > otherwise it uses the value provided in the property (e.g. 10). > > Regarding the paper cuts, I report some of those I found on JIRA and/or the > IRC channel but since I am no longer anywhere near a productive environment > and I know my way around the system it is getting harder for me to spot them > as such... it is just like what I described, I don't think like the default > user anymore. Anyway, one of the bigger one that pop into my head just now > is that I remember a colleague having trouble using the Office Import in the > WYSIWYG editor for large documents could result in errors. Sometimes I could > not delete pages until I restarted Tomcat. The WYSIWYG editor does not alway > give the result which I would consider more suitable at that point (e.g. > color background in a table does not color the cells background but the text > background. I know that is correct from HTML POV but for an office user, I > think, the cell would make more sense) or does not even allow certain style > manipulations (e.g. vertical alignment or merging of cells, JIRA on that > exists already). > > Thanks for working through my lengthy mess, yet again, > Johannes :-D _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
