Top 5 features for distributed teams

04 Apr 2022 5 min read

Written by

Andreea Chirica

, Communications and Support Specialist

Previously we touched on what successful remote teams share and what remote companies can bring to the table in order to build strong teams. In this article, we thought it would be useful to highlight our pick of 5 features that can help distributed teams achieve even higher levels of collaboration.

Improve content with real-time editing

In XWiki, several users can edit the same page simultaneously, making it quite easy to see where each user is adding a contribution through the display of user avatars or names together with avatars. You also have cursor location indication so that you don't lose sight of your current editing place on the page. This makes it easy to collaborate on a document without having to take turns or stop progress because someone has suddenly realized they forgot to add a specific piece of content.

Realtime editing is currently available in standalone WYSIWYG Edit mode or Wiki Edit mode and the Product team is working to add support for in-place editing as well soon.

Bonus: users can edit in realtime documents (docx, xlsx, pptx) within the wiki using the OnlyOffice Connector application.

Enhance communication through annotations and comments

In XWiki it is possible to have conversations through the usage of annotations and comments. Use these options to communicate accurately the type of content you'd like to have on your wiki pages, what contributions you can bring, provide feedback and even make decisions without leaving the wiki. You can also use annotations to note certain aspects that you'd like to discuss during meetings or highlight sections that you'd like to call out in discussions with your colleagues.

Bonus: you can also use mentions within annotations and comments in XWiki (starting with 12.10+ versions).

Connect users from various teams using project templates

In XWiki, you can make use of a hierarchy of nested pages to create project templates for each department of your organization. You can use templates such as roadmaps, showing the evolution of certain objectives, for onboarding purposes, or even to display certain services for people outside of your company. Learn here more about how you can build project templates using nested pages.

Bonus: You can also help people connect through using several (sub)wikis. A reason for this would be that you want only specific groups of users to have access to certain apps on a wiki. Or you'd like to keep internal information on a separate wiki than the one you share with the public.

Customize collaboration options with rights settings

Bringing distributed teams together also means providing them with a secure place where they can focus on their tasks and efficiently communicate. That's why Wiki provides powerful rights management features to help you streamline collaboration on your wiki while protecting sensitive and confidential parts of your platform through the set permissions.

Learn from this comprehensive article about permissions types and their effects, basic rules for private versus open or public wikis, rights at page level, best practices for rights management on the main wiki, and the possibly included sub-wikis. 

Keep track of page authors using the History feature

When your content collaborators are in different locations in the world and in different timezones, it can be difficult to follow the evolution of a page or document - who added certain sections or who changed media elements on the page. In XWiki, each page save is historized and stored under Version Control. This helps ensure you can keep clear track of what's happening to each page without too much hassle or confusion. Apart from the option to view the last author, there is also the History section with following options available:

  • View a previous version of the page
  • Compare any two versions either on the raw content or (since XWiki 11.6RC1) on the rendered content
  • Set an older version as the current version (rollback); available only if the user has edit rights on the page
  • Delete a version completely from the history (useful for removing spam, for example); available only if the user has administration rights
  • Delete an entire version range from the history; also available only if the user has administration rights
  • Show the last authors on each line of the page's content along with the revision in which this modification was introduced.
Make the best of these features to improve collaboration between the distributed teams within your organization. If you are interested in what else XWiki is bringing to the table, check out these key differentiating features. What would you add to the list?

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