Experience Reports and/or Suggestions: Managing Files and Documentation with a Wiki and NextCloud

[GOhrner]

@vmassol

Yes, I think XWiki would benefit from integration of some “Excel” like JS framework for editing large tables. Something like https://jspreadsheets.com/ .

Looks pretty interesting and slick and would be a cool addition to XWiki actually, if it can be created and edited easily.

Still, there will be several cases where a full fledged online office solution has advantages. OnlyOffice is an already supported option, alternatively integration with Collabora CODE would be fine for users who chose this and cannot or do not want to switch / migrate and cannot or do not want to administrate and run both of them.

See:
https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/EXOIDEA-1

@vmassol

Collaborative real-time editing (several people working on a single document at the same time) is only experimental in XWiki and not yet ready for production use, but works just fine in NextCloud with Collabora CODE.

Actually we believe it should be production ready (or very very close) but we need more feedback. Would be great if you could try the latest version and tell us how it works.

I tried it a while ago, and it did basically work, but I e.g. stumbled across Loading... and postponed further tests until this is resolved. I fear that problems like this will affect XWiki user acceptance in my team, especially if it cannot directly be attributed to some specific extension by a normal user - the general impression will just be that “XWiki doesn’t work”.

@vmassol

XWiki and NextCloud both have OnlyOffice online office integration. I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds similar to Collabora CODE.

You should try it, I tested it a few times and it worked very well for me and it’s very convenient. It’s especially great for organizations used to (MS) Office docs and it allows them to use a familiar editor. While at the same time allowing to transition to a wiki-based content management system.

Well, the think is that we’re already using Collabora CODE, which is a direct competitor to OnlyOffice,
and so we’d have to add an additional service we need to administrate, setup and which my users have to learn, until we decide that we could ditch one of them again because the other can completely take over.

Another drawback of OnlyOffice is that its Community Edition does not support presentation files. And I only want to buy a license if I’m confident that it’s the right tool for us, just as I did with XWiki.

I’m nevertheless curious to try OnlyOffice, but so far am lacking the time to try it.

@vmassol

Do you mean sharing for users not having an account in the wiki? Couldn’t you integrate with LDAP or something so that everyone gets an account? Is the need for external users to the company?

We did integrate XWiki with our LDAP, but we also share documents - sometimes editable, sometimes not - with employees from other companies.

@vmassol

Also it still would not always be clear if you’d have to look for information in some wiki page which then has the file as an attachment, or in the File Manager application.

At least you get to see them all in the attachment view but also in search.

Mh? I’m a bit lost.

@vmassol

Could be great to create some jiras for the file manager extension at Issues · xwikisas/application-filemanager · GitHub to tell XWiki SAS what could be improved specifically

That’s actually a bit difficult - I’m no UI gui and it’s a bit difficult for me to describe what’s actually missing from the XWIki FileManager UI. Possibly I’ll have to try it a bit more. I just know that NextCloud’s file management web UI feels much slicker and “straigt forward” to use at first glance.

@vmassol

• The File Manager app creates one page per file and XWiki scales very well with the number of pages (we know xwiki instances with several millions of pages without issues).

Mh, however this sounds like quite a bit of overhead to me - for example, we have many hundred tiny icon image files, each of which is only a few hundred bytes in size. (Icon resources for our projects.) I’d imagine that XWiki then probably creates more management information in the database than the actual icon file actually contains as data.

However, I’ll give it a shot and see how well FileManager deals with this use case.

@vmassol

Now this extension is still not supported by the core xwiki dev team as a whole but there’s been recent work on it by Clemens (a core committer). See Commits · xwiki-contrib/webdav · GitHub

Ah, good to hear.

Meanwhile, I tried to include XWiki as an “external storage” in NextCloud using WebDAV. The idea was to make XWiki attachments searchabel in NextCloud, even if it would still be in a separate folder hierarchy.

However, this only “sort of” works and bails out very often, but I’ve not yet had time to analyze it further so far.

Also the XWiki WebDAV server folder layout is pretty complex and actually redundant, with the same information accessible using different paths.

@vmassol

but also here the File Manager application provides it’s own separate folder hierarchy, so files managed there are separated from files stored as attachments.

I don’t feel this is a problem since you can navigate by pages or by attachments and they both point to the same attachments in the end.

I’m lost again here - maybe I got something wrong concerning the way the File Manager extension works? I wasn’t able to see any pages or any attachments in the File Manager application. It had a totally separate folder hierarchy, independent of my XWiki pages / spaces.

So the only advantage of using the File Manager application would be that its contents would be covered by the XWiki search feature - I’d still have two separate documentation hierarchies, as I currently do with XWiki and NextCloud, and as a user looking for documentation concerning something you would have to manually look at the corresponding location in both hierarchies yourself if you do not know what words to search for…

@vmassol

This could be easily fixed. BTW if you were interested in sponsoring the WebDAV extension, I’m sure XWiki SAS and Clemens would be happy to help on that.

I do not want to exclude to sponsor some XWiki development, however it’d be good to know how this is “usually” done at XWiki SAS and what it would cost and what I could expect in return. I still have a question open with your commercial support regarding this and assume they will get back to me soon with some feedback.

Maybe another interesting feature actually might by WebDAV client functionality in XWiki, possibly as a macro or something - then I might be able to display a list of files from the corresponding NextCloud folder within the XWiki page as clickable links… Tough that’s also not yet really though out till the end, I’ll continue to ponder this a bit…

Regards,

Gunter