As it turned out, the Motorola story is more of the Open Source story variety where software is used quietly and then catches the attention and acceptance by many others.

“The TWiki is used in Motorola Systems-on-Chip Design Technology,” he wrote. It was being run on a vanilla Apache server, undergoing no customization other than templates. Being first used in the confines of a single project team, other project teams began to take notice. They created new Webs and contributed to existing topics.

“Depending on how you use it, TWiki performs the same functions as a number of corporate solutions (usually clunky lotus-notes things[sic]).” Though TWiki could do the work of proprietary collaboration software, Currie wasn’t holding his breath over the likelihood that TWiki would dominate any time soon.

Currie wrote that “We have been accused of non-compliance by using the TWiki. To avoid the flack, we have come to refer to the TWiki as a communication scratchpad.” Weasel words, he confessed, “but at least we don’t get fired.”

Two years and a bunch of plug-ins and support scripts later, there is another Motorola story to tell: TWiki need not hide in any back-room or take an alias like communication scratchpad. And Currie was not fired. In fact, his group is just one of at least five TWiki installations running in Motorola. “Even its detractors are starting to like it,” says Currie in his updated success story report of July 16 this year. “As well as our own project group, we host Webs for 17 other groups in Motorola.”

Hardly end of story. TWiki has been steadily kicking in the doors of businesses using group-work processes to accomplish projects and tasks, from aerospace to software manufacturing, to telecom. Peter Thoeny, a software development manager at WindRiver, is the author of Open Source TWIki. He and other members form a small core development team. Under their stewardship, TWiki has become a Web-based collaboration system mature enough to be of business use.

One collaboration feature that is a must-have for businesses set to deploy collaboration software is version control. Users in a business setting require the proverbial footprints to know who has been changing what part of any document. A collaboration platform that’s too radically egalitarian might not have a change log which, for many businesses, would render it useless. TWiki in contrast has revision support, where every change can be followed.

What first inspired Thoeny to become ‘Mr. TWiki?’

Thoeny credits the birth of TWiki to its origins, the WikiWiki system of programmer Ward Cunningham, who offered WikiWiki as a new method of collaboration where informational Web pages could be open and free for anyone to edit as they wish. Using Perl CGI scripts, the WikiWiki system was designed to let anybody create and change pages via an ordinary Web browser. Thoeny, like many others, understood that this was a valuable fulfillment of the Tim Berners-Lee Web vision of a living, breathing, writable, not static, Web. Subsequently, Wiki Wiki inspired an avalanche of clones. Thoeny thought, What about a clone for corporate intranets?

To accomplish the business requirements for authentication and version control, TWIki was designed to use basic authentication, or SSL, compatible with popular browsers.

To address simplicity for all business work groups, TWiki avoids complex URLs. Another business-ready feature is its ability to attach files to Web pages in a way that’s similar to working with e-mail attachments.

Thoeny’s own employers, embedded software company, WindRiver, often works as teams spread out over more than one location. Not surprisingly, WindRiver uses TWiki as an engineering repository for project management. They leverage TWiki’s web environment for tracking teams, schedules, interdependencies, code reviews, and meeting minutes.

Thoeny lights into static Intranets as inferior: “A static Intranet centrally managed by a Webmaster team implies that content update needs to go through the Webmaster, by design.” He says when that is the case, employees who see some inaccurate or outdated content on the Intranet are not so likely to send out an e-mail requesting an update. The Webmaster bottleneck usually results in an Intranet with static and often inaccurate content. TWiki removes the Webmaster bottleneck.

Thoeny says TWiki now averages 30 to 40 downloads per day, and is being used behind corporate firewalls, including major names like 3Com, AMD, Alcatel, Amazon.com, AT&T ,through Xerox. The time has never been riper as corporate environments increasingly see how two, four, maybe 100 heads are better than one in realtime conversations and information gathering, generating new products and new strategies, often across disciplines as well as geographical borders.

The technology shift from e-mail to Web environments in turn is hand in hand with the shift from hierarchical work to flattened settings, being fed by the collaborative technologies that enable dynamic idea exchange as never before. The TWiki-enlightened do not have to do a lot of convincing to evangelize on how TWiki is a better tool than e-mail for information swapping.

Typically, says Thoeny, TWiki is adopted by an individual contributor or group leaders, and then after some time TWiki gets accepted in the group. The next step in selling it internally to tell the manager

So if TWiki has so much momentum, where does that leave collaboration market leaders like Lotus Domino/Notes and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook? Can this Open Source upstart threaten their market share any time soon?

If one considers the early corporate derision hurled against Linux or database systems like MySQL, one can never say never. Lotus Notes is proprietary; TWiki is Open Source, GPLed software; the Perl CGI source code templates and documentation are, after all, available for free. “Lotus Notes has a longer history and more features, but the key point,” says Thoeny, “is that TWiki has become quite a mature product, and is being used in many corporations already.”

Thoeny says the greatest upward movement occurred two years ago, as a result of TWiki’s becoming hosted on the development website, Sourceforge. “That created quite a bit of exposure,” says Thoeny.

As of this month (Aug. 2002), there were 16,600 downloads; 9,200 pages; and 3,600 registered users at TWIKI.org. One wonders if TWiki could also become an Open Source story of a development community turning to a profit-making business model, where .org feeds into inc.

Right now, no, says Thoeny. But he does not rule that out. “I see a possibility at some time. I do not, however, see TWiki switching over to a closed model. The Open Source community is of so much value in its feedback; we are so close to the customer!”

One possible route, he says, is to offer TWiki on a rental basis; the other idea he would consider is to offer an additional TWiki “tailored to quite large organizations.”