Hi Yury,
I develop business applications with SMW, primarily for profit, but it gives a lot of fun as well. For me as well as for the customer and the people using it :-).
One of the success stories is a solution for a small company that delivers direct mail services. The wiki covers everything but the accounting stuff that is done by an online accounting system. The wiki supports CRM, proposals, calculation, invoicing, task mgt, projects and export to the online accounting system of customer and invoice data.
What makes the customer happy is primarily the flexibility and speed. Usually such companies have to use packaged solutions that typically provide (much) more functionality than needed and not some functionality that is desperately needed. So they always end up using only small part of the software in combination with Excel and Word. With a 'wikibase' (my name for such solutions) they get only what they need and everything they need. And if they think of improvements, they register them in the wikibase, we discuss them and in no time they are implemented. That is unheard of for such companies.
Why chosen MediaWiki and SMW? Is there an alternative :-).
I didn't program anything additional, just used a handful of extensions. Since I don't know php I have always searched, and found, ways to do it with the existing software. And no tricky methodologies :-)
The wikibase definitely changed the way customer and users work with their information systems. When something doesn't work the way they want, they think of improvements, knowing that they can be implemented. Instead of figuring out some - usually personal, not at all collaborative - way to solve things with Excel.
We provide also hosting of the wikibase, administration. And, what is very interesting as well, I am asked to have a look myself in their wikibase and come up with ideas to improve their way of working. So that is a moderator role, not only on the content but also on the way of working. This is an added value that companies are willing to pay for.
Training? I had hoped to sell some user-training, but that wasn't necessary. The wikibase is so easy to use that no training is needed :-( ;-).
Customers pay for development and a monthly fee that can be made up of several components such as hosting, SSL, small improvements.
Before entering this 'market' I tried some things that are important for the solution. These were printing of proposals and invoices, calculations based on price lists of products and services, and export to the accounting system. Printing works very well with the things that you can do in Print.css and with the options to include of exclude parts of a page in printing. The fact that you can choose to print on stationery (without the graphics) and print to pdf with the background graphics is a popular feature. Calculations and showing amounts on the screen in the right format are a bit of a disaster here in The Netherlands where the decimal . is a , and the thousand separator is a . :-(. But I'm not complaining :-). Exporting whatever information works easier than I have ever experienced in my own programming times (long ago). You gather the needed information in the desired structure in subobjects and export to csv.
I really want to share more than photos of happy users with the community. But of course all wikis are very private and I haven't developed things like skins or extensions. If anyone has questions, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.
The main thing I have learned from this project is that it is entirely possible to deliver a tailor made solution for small companies for a reasonable price. And that may be very interesting because there seems to be an big potential market for such solutions. So it was definitely worth it!
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Ad Strack van Schijndel Wikibase Solutions www.wikibase.nl +31 6 4023 2715
On 28 januari 2013, at 21:17, Yury Katkov katkov.juriy@gmail.com wrote:
Hi guys!
Can anybody tell about the success story you've had with MediaWiki? If you're not a good writer, here is the list of interesting questions. Of course you can describe your story without looking at them.
- What was the project about?
- Who was the customer? Was it an open project?
- What the community looked like? Where those people on the wiki came from?
- Why you've chosen MediaWiki and not another solution?
- Did you program anything additional for MediaWiki, did you integrate with some other services and applications?
- Or maybe you've elaborated some tricky methodology?
- How did the project change the life of your customer?
- Was the community motivated? How active they were?
- Did you provide any kind of support and consulting?
- Maybe you've provided admins, moderators, facilitators? How did you teach them?
- Did you have any trainings?
- Anything about money? $-)
- What obstacles and difficulties have you faced?
- How much time did you spend on a different stages of your project?
- Do you have any open results? The project itself, the skins, extensions, papers, articles, photos of the happy users?
- What have you learnt from the project?
- In general: was it worth it?
Cheers, Yury Katkov, WikiVote
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