I've had the pleasure of presenting at talk with Tugduall Grall from eXo Platform on "Wiki vs CMS" at this great USI 2009 conference.

It was great to see such a turn up (the room was packed with people standing up) thus proving that lots of people are wondering what are really the differences between those 2 technologies and whether they are going to converge or not.

The main message of the talk was:

• For collaboration on content the wiki is king
• For publication of content the CMS is king

Update 2009-07-22: The talk was recorded (in French) and is now available here

Here are some details that were given verbally.

Slide 4 ("Edition de contenu")

• CMS
  • Strong focus on content publication
  • Strong Navigation / Categorisation
  • Publication processed based on user roles and permissions
  • Strongly structured content, existing content, known initially
  • Document models (article, calendar, product sheet, ...)
• Wiki
  • Strong focus on collaboration and content creation
  • The content self organize as time progresses
  • Content not known initially
  • Navigation using content (linking)
  • Validation process based on collaboration ("collective intelligence")
  • Innovation zone

Slide 7 ("Les wiki dans l'Entreprise")

• Wikis are on the verge of becoming mainstream in the Enterprise according to Gartner
• When this happens we'll see RFP for Enterprises looking for a Wiki (compared to the situation right now where it's users/projects installing Wikis) and it'll be IT departments who will provide on demand wiki farms for projects.

Slide 9 ("Quiz")

• We asked attendants whether they thought that the site done with a Wiki was the left one or the right one. The majority said it was the left one. Bad luck since it's the right one (France 2025) that was done with XWiki.
• This show that a web site and nice looking one at that can be realized with both tools. Wikis are no longer reserved for "ugly" sites
• However the main reason that the France2025 was done with a wiki (XWiki) is that most of the site is about collaboration. It's about allowing French citizens to make proposals of what they think France should do at the 2025 horizon. They can also comments and rates proposals.
• On the opposite the left site is the belgium Tax payer site which requires strong validation before publication and hence was done with a CMS (eXo Platofrm) using a strong workflow.
• Thus even though both tools can be implemented for web sites the usages still mandate using a wiki or a CMS.

Slide 20 ("Outsider: Google")

• The conclusion was that Google was not really seen as a competitior but more someone you integrate with rather than compete with.
• Both XWiki and eXo had done integrations in the past with Google Docs/Spreadsheet and both are very eagerly waiting for integrating with Google Wave when it's out