The French Press Agency (AFP) chose the XWiki Enterprise edition with the Watch extension to follow the threads of information and to classify them by themes in the iBusiness platform.
This platform aggregates the competitive and sectoral information on a global scale. Every worldwide correspondent is called to contribute, to download documents, to comment on information.
After successfully starting to use XWiki, AFP also installed the XWiki Enterprise. Today, more than 10 platforms with different uses allow every employee from AFP to be more efficient.
2. XWiki SAS - 35/37, rue Beaubourg - 75003 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 42 40 90
Fax: +33 (0)9 59 26 92 14
Email: contact@xwiki.com
Website: www.xwiki.com
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All branches of the editorial, sales and marketing teams from Agence France Presse have very
good knowledge of the media market and technological developments involved in changing
business models. In order to sustain this capital of information, it was decided to provide these
teams with a collaborative intelligence platform, developed on a wiki, which allows everyone to
learn and inform its employees.
Background and issues
AFP is a global news agency delivering a fast, accurate, and in-depth coverage of the events of interest
on the international stage in 6 languages and several formats (video, text, photos, multimedia and
graphics). While the main market of the AFP, the media, is facing many complex issues (downward
trend in readership, dispersion of the audiences, development of 'nomadism', transfer of advertising
revenues...), it is essential for both the editorial directions and the marketing and sales network to
control these problems, by having a compete view of the movements taking place in this sector.
The needs
Taking into account that the sources of relevant information can be extremely diverse (newspapers,
blogs...) and the sectorial intelligence was already experimented by the teams, it was decided to design
a "node"; this had the structure of a single platform that allows any user to be informed and find all
relevant information according to the markets and products he is in charge of, and in the meantime,
to post articles, reviews, analyzes just in a few clicks.
Sector: media
Need: providing a collaborative
intelligence platform to the
AFP correspondents
Solution: collaborative
intelligence
Product: XWiki Enterprise
“XWiki is not a traditional wiki; it's an "extended" wiki which
offered many features that we were looking for, such as the
export of pages to PDFs or the application programming
interface. Another thing that impressed us is the fact that the
XWiki products were open source. In other words, it was
possible to test a product and to make a prototype without a big
investment; this contributed to its implementation.”
(Denis Teyssou, Medialab R&D editorial responsible)
3. XWiki SAS - 35/37, rue Beaubourg - 75003 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 42 40 90
Fax: +33 (0)9 59 26 92 14
Email: contact@xwiki.com
Website: www.xwiki.com
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iBusiness Platform
All the members of the editorial direction and of the sales and marketing networks around the world
are welcomed to use the iBusiness platform as both an information source and as means of sharing
(contributions in the form of articles, analysis, comments) on the media sector.
Several "professional watchers" in the AFP use the XWiki Watch module, in which over a hundred
qualified RSS feeds (on "media and technology") were integrated, in order to select the significant
information for the community users.
As for the users, they are invited to contribute directly to the site built with the XWiki open source
solution, in the proposed to them structure (region spaces, market spaces, product spaces).
By setting their profile, each user can be notified by mail or by a RSS feed about the new contributions
available online (due to the "watchmen" or other users), depending on their interests.
Benefits
While it is always difficult to quantify the benefits of business intelligence, we can highlight the
following points:
time saving for all users who already had a business intelligence "craft" (daily search for
information on search engines and sharing via email). This site allows them both to inform, to
be informed and quickly find archived documents
improvement of capital knowledge on markets, customers, products and technologies for all
active users, and also for those who didn't practice a regular business collaborative intelligence
before the establishment of the particular site