MindTouch Launches Attack on Stagnant Corporate Intranets

• MindTouch Collaborative Intranet is First of Three Collaborative Network Solutions to Roll-out in 2009
• Family of Collaborative Network Solutions to Turn Enterprise Portals “Inside-Out”

SAN DIEGO, June 23, 2009 — MindTouch, developer of one of the top open source projects in the world, today announced the immediate availability of the first of three turnkey collaborative network solutions the company intends to launch over the next six months. MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, built on the company’s popular MindTouch 2009 open source collaboration platform, addresses the failure of current corporate portals and enterprise social networks to deliver value to business users, while simultaneously transforming a company’s IT staff into an army of application developers.

By deploying MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, companies can federate content from across the data and application silos their employees use each day — ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, social networks — to create a vibrant real time information fabric. MindTouch Collaborative Intranet connects the legacy business systems companies use every day and pulls data from each individual silo into a single, common and unified Web interface. Unlike more traditional approaches to data federation — such as static portals or plug-in-dependent wikis — MindTouch Collaborative Intranet presents the data in a format that is interactive, collaborative and scalable. And with operational excellence near the top of every manager’s performance objectives this year, MindTouch Collaborative Intranet becomes a highly-valuable tool to drive greater visibility and transparency across an organization’s business.

“Collaborative networks not only reshape how software is developed, they completely reinvent the connection between existing enterprise applications and today’s consumer-based social networks,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch. “What we’ve done with MindTouch Collaborative Intranet is take what we’ve learned through hundreds of enterprise engagements over the last two years and combined it with independent research conducted among the Fortune 1000, to define and develop what may rightly be seen as the intranet of the future.”

[For more, see Fulkerson’s groundbreaking post on collaborative networks here.]

Throughout the past decade, companies spent millions of dollars and man-hours building in-house intranets on portal frameworks designed to increase the flow of information and collaboration among employees. However, because these intranets were designed by engineers and HR departments — not by the employees who would use them — many today sit static, serving as vast dumping grounds for departmental files rather than the collaborative platforms they were intended to be.

The explosion of social networks further exacerbated the stale reality of many intranets as employees quickly began to adopt social networks, social bookmarking, forums, blogs, video and microblogging as their primary means of collaboration. Traditional enterprise software vendors responded by wrapping individual, consumer-based social tools in an enterprise message and tacking them on as features to their proprietary, closed-source software suites.

MindTouch Collaborative Intranets address the limitations of today’s intranet solutions with a more modern approach to collaboration. Built with a Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), MindTouch Collaborative Intranets take the traditional service-oriented architecture approach to application development — prevalent for roughly a decade in the enterprise — and applies Web-based fundamentals to developing more robust, collaborative intranets. By building on WOA, MindTouch fixes the limitations currently hamstringing enterprise collaboration by injecting life back into enterprise IT.

"With MindTouch we had the perfect framework to federate our varied disparate enterprise tools and systems to build a collaborative intranet that spans our entire corporation. The WOA foundation provided us with unprecedented agility to develop and deploy applications rapidly giving us much higher ROI from our IT investments" said Troy Saxton-Getty, VP of Engineering at Bill Me Later. "This kind of collaborative Intranet is so valuable I expect every corporation and organization will soon be using MindTouch. MindTouch has solved the problem of data access, sharing and edting that I have struggled to overcome for the last twenty years.”

About MindTouch

MindTouch provides powerful, versatile software for creating, sharing and managing strategic content across the enterprise. Our open source product, MindTouch Core, has been embraced by over 20 million users and is supported by one of the open source industry's most active communities. Our flagship product, MindTouch TCS, is the “killer app” for documentation, transforming the way organizations author, discover and curate their strategic content to achieve measurable business ROI with customers, partners, and colleagues. To learn more, visit http://www.mindtouch.com