Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

See Wikipedia:SWOT_analysis

The table below is an attempt to disseminate information that can answer the question:

What is the long term viability, support outlook and expectation of the Foswiki project?

To allow for more solid conclusions, please contribute issues, opinions, counter-opinions, worries, facts as you see them.

Strengths

Usage Experience

  • Data is Wiki and Wiki is Data, how cool is that?
  • Management Friendly Data Management
  • Integrated Documentation
  • Large and continually growing extensions base
  • Really strong support, through IRC and web

Social

  • Enthusiastic contributor and user community
  • After one year there are more contributors doing more work than ever

Development

  • An interesting Perl codebase - opportunities for all levels of contributors
  • a policy of writing unit tests to ensure compatibly
  • Purposeful security evaluations and code reviews
  • Lots of scope for developer creativity

Weaknesses

Usage Experience

  • Function before Form may hurt first impressions
  • Default interface design has not moved with the times
  • Google search of Foswiki subject leads to too many sites with similar (identical) page names along with the string Foswiki. Documentation searches can be cause for pause.

Social

  • few marketing dollars

Opportunities

Social

  • Spirit of Openness - a pure open source project that is not beholden to non-contributing influences.
  • Growing awareness
  • Peer support networks

Development

  • An approachable codebase that can attract developers
  • Work is underway to improve the user interface
  • Plugin and extension development

Threats

Information Underload

  • Need for some detailed marketing data

Social

  • The fork has public relations issues
    • Is this threat perceived or real?
      • It's real; at least among users on the west coast of America (i.e. within easy range of (tm)wiki disinformation) it is real.
  • Are intrusions an issue?

Competition


I'd ditch the talk about google wave, and replace it with real products, which are actually shown to have benefits. the fact that google wave server is (uselessly) open sourced when the wave client is closed source, and even now no-one's sure if it has any upsides makes it more important to list something like Sharepoint

-- SvenDowideit - 19 Oct 2009

Thanks for the edit! Whilst I agree that Wave and how it might be relevant (I have some ideas where Wave might complement rather than compete with a wiki) should be discussed, that discussion doesn't need to be here on this topic.

Products that compete with Foswiki should at least be in roughly the same market segment: Confluence, for example.

-- PaulHarvey - 19 Oct 2009

Adding a comment box, and cheerleading. On the Data is Wiki and Wiki is Data thing. Everyone realizes that you've built Foswiki into a whole greater than sum multi layered spreadsheet, database, form processor ... in a wiki thingy? Well Done. I'll opine that this is technology that needs to be explored and exploited. A definite Strength.

-- BrianTiffin - 24 Oct 2009

Brian - yup smile my elevator descrition is that foswiki is a web based, multi-user, versioned replacement for MS Access.

-- SvenDowideit - 24 Oct 2009 - 21:51

I'd like to keep working on this analysis. For this I'd ask for a little assistance. If any Foswiki experts can find the time, please add a small note as to what you feel is the single most important strength and opportunity (and perhaps how they can be leveraged) along with a single greatest weakness and threat (and perhaps thoughts on how these can be mitigated).

-- BrianTiffin - 29 Oct 2009 - 22:10

  • Single most important strength that prevents us moving to another platform: Foswiki allows rapid development of structured document databases, using just standard wiki topic markup, and without writing any custom plugin code.
  • Single greatest technical weakness: AJAX and managing Javascript infrastructure in Foswiki, whilst relatively easy to do, is more ad-hoc, informal and generally underdeveloped compared to other platforms like Drupal. We are getting steady improvement though, and I suspect the next 12 months will see us catch up significantly.
  • Single greatest usability weakness: We don't ship with any practical information taxonomy/classification system, which should be an out-of-the-box feature.
  • Single greatest threat: there isn't one, there's a spectrum of things out there that do some things better than Foswiki - and so for me I suppose, if ad-hoc document databases suddenly become a trivial thing to do using standard document markup to build queries and wiki applications in some other product, I'd then have to consider it and take the cost of migration + all other parts of the feature-set comparison into account.

-- PaulHarvey - 28 Apr 2010 - 23:38

• Single greatest strength: ease with which foswiki is extended (e.g. via plugins) and integrated with other systems (via plugins and the filesystem-based backend)
• Single greatest weakness - the wysiwyg editor is not polished

-- MichaelTempest - 29 Apr 2010 - 06:49

Google Wave was never a threat to foswiki or wikis in general. Besides, the hype is over. Instead look at

gartner-2009-magic-quadrant.png.

I wouldn't even consider Google Docs as a threat. They aren't participating in the typical market segments that foswiki participates in. Instead I've added Jive Software and Lotus Connections (IBM). There are a few web-based products that play an important role in corporate knowledge and project management. But they aren't a sort of threat as standard foswiki isn't comparable at all. Still 37signals.com or FreshBooks really set standards you can't afford not to catch up with.

T(m)wiki is a story of itself. It is a different kind of threat, not wrt its product, but more with regards to brand, trademarks and copyrights. It is more the other way around: Foswiki is the most sever threat to T(m)wiki as the customers vote with their feet by upgrading/migrating from T to F constantly, but not the other way around.

-- MichaelDaum - 29 Apr 2010

I would consider Google Docs and Google Wave a "threat" only in the sense that these types of applications really raise the bar and user expectaions substantially. They don't want to have to put up with the browser doing whole-page-loads for each screen, quirky WYSIWYG as MichaelTempest pointed out, lack of guidance/prompting on eg. ACLs (NatEditPlugin does an okay job at fixing this), and "surprises" - like the weirdness we get deleting attachments.

Just last week I had a user very reluctantly having to use the wiki instead of google spreadsheets; she missed the real-time multi-user capability of the google solution, and wiki tables + CALC are just plain awkward by comparison.

I think we are on the way to great usability improvements, but we are way behind the really slick stuff the likes of 37signals, google docs and friends are putting out.

-- PaulHarvey - 30 Apr 2010

All that said - I should point out that, despite the perceived lack of slickness, it generally doesn't get in the way of productivity - just adds to the amount of training required.

-- PaulHarvey - 30 Apr 2010

Here, "threat" is used less in the sense of technology and more in the sense of market segments where competing products are available to chose from to fulfill similar use cases.

And yes, there's definitely a lot of excellent products out there to learn from wrt technology and usability.

Note, that Google Docs/Waves was listed under Threats > Competition ... which is rather wrong as these things are so different: you wont pitch them against each other; they are no replacements for one another; anything googlish is most certainly out for intranet requirements with a well defined audience sharing otherwise non-disclosed material, a common cenario for Foswiki.

-- MichaelDaum - 30 Apr 2010

The hype is over, and the product as well: Google gives up on Wave.

-- ArthurClemens - 05 Aug 2010
 
Topic revision: r23 - 05 Aug 2010, ArthurClemens
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