Essential XWiki Apps for Professional Wikis

09 Oct 2020 5 min read

Written by

Andreea Chirica

, Communications and Support Specialist

Apps are everywhere. They come with promises: of creating productivity where there was none, of building collaboration where it's scarce, of visually sharing knowledge where there are long, unreadable pages, or of just bringing a bit of structure in a cluttered system. And some of them really bring those promises to fruition. To make it easier to identify how XWiki apps can suit your needs, check out how the following apps bring benefits to their users.

At organization level

When considering the use of a tool that brings together your documentation, knowledge base or intranet, you might want to connect a small or large existing user base. In XWiki, there are multiple options to do this: either connecting users from an existing directory service using the Active Directory Application or the Google Apps Integration.

There are also cases when you want to quickly access business documents, reports, presentations and here, the Office365 Integration comes to your assistance by providing the ability to display and to search for office documents in OneDrive. Moreover, with your own private cloud office, you could both create and edit docx, xlsx, pptx attachments using the OnlyOffice Connector Application

Now, after connecting users to the wiki and starting to bring in documents from multiple sources, you might experience security issues when it comes to wiki attachments. Here is the best solution to provide extra protection for your wiki: the XWiki Antivirus Application - it scans uploaded attachments via an external antivirus engine, performing varios checks through different algorithms and its extensive virus database.

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As the subject of data privacy protection is even more important nowadays, especially if your wiki is public, we have a GDPR Cookie Consent application created for you to achieve and maintain cookie compliance.

The wiki users can then start using the Ideas Application to share ideas about new features, benefits, event venue proposals, tool recommendations or solutions that would then be summoned to vote. A great alternative to this would be the Polls application, for those who prefer Doodle-like tools. 

Whether you are selling products, services or you have a tool which has reached a lot of users, share some tips and best practices about them using a Frequently Asked Questions app.

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At team level

For your HR team and employees, in general, life and collaboration is made simpler with the following apps:

  • Created by XWiki community contributors, the Holiday Request app helps both managers and employees manage vacation time (automatic calculation of remaing days) or sick days.
  • Built with AppWithinMinutes, the Recruitment app helps keeping a tidy recruitment process, with up to date details about candidates. Bonus tip AppWithinMinutes can be used  as well to create product presentation pages or even an inventory.
  • A customizable Expense Report app helps generate expense reports, with the ability to set the expense type, the organization and its currency.

Whether your wiki is public or private, having a place where your teams could discuss or vote company procedures or project topics can be obtained using the Forum Application. Also, the forum can be a place for discussing improvements, bugs and support documentation for users of your services or tools. You also don't need to worry if there would be innapropriate content because your forum moderators will be notified of each possible occurrence through the Flag queue.

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The QA and Support teams enjoy using the Jira Macro to get information from a Jira server and to display tickets in a table, list or enumeration. Note that if you need to connect to a JIRA instance that requires authentication, you'll need to install the JIRA Administration extension and configure there your Jira server.

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Then, the Marketing team will like sharing your brand story to the world using the Blog Application. Check out the XWiki.org blog where news are brought about new features, product releases, FAQs, surveys, events or tutorials. The XWiki.com blog is also a customized version of this application. The HR squad from XWiki SAS uses the Blog app as an internal source of monthly news about the XWiki squads activities and updates.
 

For all teams, their work is tidier and more transparent with the File Manager application. It helps your teams organize files inside XWiki using a tree hierarchy of folders. You can use drag & drop to upload new files and to modify the folder hierarchy. Within the manager, a wide range of files types can be viewed (office documents, PDFs) or played (in case of audio and video files) directly from the wiki. 

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Your teams could keep up with the decisions and tasks discussed during meetings using the Meeting Application. When meetings are created, you can also get a calendar view of them to keep you on track. Add meeting details, participants, a map of the location in case it's organized at a certain client or venue, even a poll if you'd need to vote some project or event details together with your team.

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At employee level

The Task Manager app allows users to create and assign tasks from anywhere on the wiki. Each task has a task number generated automatically, a name, project, description, status, severity, reporter, assignee and a due date. The application homepage lists all the existing tasks. Project Manangers would be delighted to have their tasks organized in a Kanban Board.

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This next app can be used for multiple cases, such as: wireframes, mockups, UML, charts, BPMN, mind maps, tree & network diagrams, importing Gliffy diagrams etc. The Diagram Application can do all of this using the jgraph/draw.io integration.

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Whether you have screenshots or product images, showcase series of images on your wiki pages using the Gallery Macro. You could display all the images attached to the current page, from a RSS feed or from external sources using the image URL. It's easily customizable with a bit of added CSS or LESS and you could also use Bootstrap Grid System. It was used as well in this article. emoticon_grin

Don't leave the PDF files only in the attachments section or on external sources. Display them on wiki pages using the PDF Viewer Macro.

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Help your colleagues find an event or meeting location with the Map Macro, which displays a geographical interactive map provided by maps services.

The JW Player is an open-source embeddable media player for web sites, supporting many commonly-used audio and video formats. We recommend in XWiki the JWPlayer Macro as the player is easy to configure, customize and extend. It was used as well to showcase the videos on this article and it's also used on other articles from our blogemoticon_smile

Where can you find XWiki apps?

Check out the XWiki Store for more details about the XWiki Pro connectors and business applications which can be purchased individually or in set. You could easily try them out by going in the administration of your wiki, the Extensions section, and get trial licenses for the XWiki Pro apps.  Don't miss as well the XWiki Extensions site where you can find over 600 extensions: applications, macros, skins, plugins or themes provided with love by the XWiki community.
 

Conclusions

The list of XWiki apps could go on as the workplace is embracing more and more digital tools and remote work is flourishing. Start using the apps above and others that you find on the XWiki Store or on the XWiki Extensions site and stick to those that bring the best results for your organization, team or user goals. In case you need assistance with any of these apps, don't hesitate to contact us or comment on this article.

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