What makes Foswiki an ideal collaboration tool?

Community and corporate wikis are based on a simple concept: allow information to flow as freely as possible by allowing the entire community to edit and update information, with as few barriers as possible. This approach provides a framework that enables an active and involved set of contributors to combine their efforts in creating and improving the data contained within the wiki.

Foswiki goes a step beyond simple aggregation of text documents by providing ways to associate meta-data with pages, and powerful macros that can extract the associated page data and content, based on complex searches. Foswiki also allows you to define a page with various parameters that can be replaced. Using parameterized pages as building blocks, combined with Foswiki's multi-faceted searching capabilities and versatile plugins that can interface with a variety of external APIs or provide additional interactivity, Foswiki users can create flexible and effective applications using Foswiki's Topic Markup Language (TML). Users can enter data using simple forms or TML, and a Foswiki application can combine and display the data in different formats: tabular, graphical, XML, in combination with external Web APIs like Google Maps, you name it!

Examples of Foswiki applications include the following:

• bug/task tracking — see the Foswiki task tracker
• categorized Frequently Asked Question lists — see the Foswiki support question list
• event calendars
• action item registers
• project status reporting
• mashups combining user-entered data with external queries (such as LDAP)