I am pleased to announce that zAgile is going open source with its first publicly available product, the v1.0 Beta of Wikidsmart for Confluence, under the GNU Affero GPL v3. Wikidsmart turns Confluence into a "semantic wiki." The Wikidsmart v1.0 Beta is available here for download. This entitles you to download and use Wikidsmart freely within your organization. Any time a modified version of the binary product is made available to the public, the code with its modifications needs to be also made available to the public.
Whereas a wiki provide an easy mechanism for users to collaborate, develop, and maintain documentation and other content within an enterprise, its inherent wiki characteristics also come with some natural limitations:
- Content organization is limited to mostly page-level hierarchies (though Confluence can help alleviate this with Spaces)
- Content Categorization may be implied in the page hierarchy but there is no inherent structure to support it
- No wiki page attributes or meta data
- Limited interoperability with other applications
- Static versus Dynamic Content
This open source license is great for your organization because there are no obligations to purchase a license, and you can prove out Wikidmart’s use in your organization, risk-free, to:
- Use semantically enabled forms to capture information in a consistent way across your user base. This ensures easy, consistent data entry that is “semantically” understood for easy cohesion across all systems other than the wiki
- Automate content exchange between systems rather than manual updates which can create bottlenecks in engineering operations and outdated and/or erroneous information
- Turn your Wiki into a Knowledge Repository that captures information across your tools and applications
A detailed description of Wikidsmart and its approach may be found here.
Today, the Wikidsmart Beta v1.0 is available for the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Please contact us if you would like to use zAgile with other wikis including MediaWiki, Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) Wiki, MindTouch Deki, SocialText, or others.
Wikidsmart is the first of three zAgile products; the others include zPortal and zComposer which are both available as early adopter releases upon request from zAgile at [email protected]