Effective April 1, 2008 MindTouch is introducing new Enterprise (support) Pricing. No, this is not an April Fools prank. We really are. All information is available at the enterprise pricing page . Aside from the new and improved look of the pricing page, which should make it a lot easier to understand your support options, the only thing that’s dramatically new is the introduction of a new product support plan: MindTouch Enterprise Platinum. This new support plan was created at the request of several of our larger enterprise customers. Specifically, this plan adds emergency bug escalation, dedicated/assigned account manager and performance tuning.

What happened to the Basic Plan? We’re still offering an updated version of this plan, but we’ve given it a more appropriate name and we’ve add a new benefit to the plan. Scroll to the bottom of the pricing page and read about the Patrons plan, this is the old Basic plan.

Existing customers will experience no changes to their plans. If you have any questions or concerns please contact MindTouch directly.

Last Monday (March 24th) Aaron and I traveled to San Francisco to attend OSBC(Open Source Business Conference). The conference was put together very well and pulled in a fairly good crowd from companies such as Microsoft, MySQl, SugarCRM and many more.

My first day at OSBC was particularly interesting. I attended a great series of panels/speakers that addressed the status of Open Source progress at largely proprietary companies. Most of the discussions, for obvious reasons, were directed at Microsoft and their current stance towards Open Source. Despite their fairly intolerant history towards Open Source there have been many recent successes within the company targeted at embracing the Open Source movement and even assisting and enabling it.

The last panel of the day was a VC panel which gave us some insight from both the VC and the entrepreneurs perspective. The panel included Jeff Clavier from SoftTech VC, Ann Windblad from Hummer-Windblad, Brian Gentile from JasperSoft and Aaron Fulkerson from MindTouch. Aaron addressed questions about the appropriate time to accept VC and also what you should look for as when narrowing down your VC search which apparently related to most of the audience.

Aaron was also asked to participate on a Social Enterprise Software Panel where he discussed MindTouch’s approach to connecting web 2.0 services on a single platform. In particular he talked about how MindTouch is enabling IT admins and end users to organize data and systems in a way that allows them to better achieve their objectives

I also had an opportunity to spend some time in the evening with other attendees. On Monday I boarded a 50 something foot catamaran and sailed around San Francisco bay courtesy of the SugarCRM team. Nice Job guys! In addition to the great cruise we were also given SugarCRM sailing jackets to keep us warm. Later on Aaron introduced me to the SugarCRM CEO John Roberts so I thanked him personally for my awesome new schwag.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the trip was the feedback I received from the other attendees. To put it best, everyone was ecstatic! It was very rewarding to see how everyone welcomed the MindTouch team and how we seemed to be a part of so many panels.

Overall the conference was a great success. I left with some great new contacts from a group of terrific companies including BitRock, Linagora, Enomaly, ProcessMaker, Xenoss and others. We also spent a fair bit of time with Mark Hinkle who offered great feedback on our efforts. I’ll be back next year for sure!

Damien
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

Over the last couple months I have been literally inundated with requests for partnership and reselling engagements from all over the globe. I’m very pleased and flattered by the stories that are being shared with me. I must apologize for a lack of responsiveness on my part. The simple fact is MindTouch is growing very quickly and we’re rapidly building systems to aid us in managing this growth; specifically with our internal sales team (we’re currently building one) and with partners. On both fronts we’ve lagged a bit behind, but with good cause. Our number one priority has been, and will continue to be, ensuring our support and engineering staff has all the resources they need to fulfill the needs of our customers. Unfortunately, while ensuring the expectations of our customers are met or exceeded I’ve neglected the needs of our growing community of companies who are interested in partnering or reselling. This is being corrected and has my complete attention currently. Everyone who has sent requests for MindTouch Reseller status or for partnering engagements over the last two months, yes there is a backlog that far back–so you’re not alone if you’re one of these companies, I assure you that you’ll be receiving a response from me personally in the next week. I also hope to be able to share some of your stories.

Here’s a story from Elvenite AB of Sweden. They work with manufacturers to provide more efficient software systems and tools. Sticking with the MindTouch mission they’re adding a “2.0″ to their client’s existing systems.

Dear Wiki makers

I would like to introduce our company and tell you a little bit about our experiences with Deki Wiki.

The founders of Elvenite AB, a Swedish based company, have been in the ERP industry (Intentia/Lawson) for more than 20 years in different positions within product development and professional services. Our business idea is to help medium to large sized producing or distributing companies leverage their investment in ERP-system by continuous improvements. For example through customization, integration with other systems, training and process redesigns. All those activities require extensive collaboration with various stakeholders in order to come to life.

7 months ago, when our business first took off, we stumbled into Deki Wiki. Overnight we became enthusiastic Wiki junkies and now we use Deki Wiki for all our internal communications. For example, we prepare meetings on the wiki and write the meeting minutes. All in the same document. Awesome. Do I need to say that our email habits radically have shifted?

…we started to listen to our customers on how they struggle with shared drives, inconsistent version management and cluttered mailboxes we are amazed. And it is equally amazing to see the reactions we get when we tell them about this well kept secret, Deki Wiki. Compared to the sales cycles for an ERP system this is just fantastic. Instead of years we are talking about sales call lasting 30 - 60 minutes.

We have therefore realized that there is a big need for a tool like this. So we are now forging a strategy to approach our customer base with the Wiki-concept. We strongly believe that this is the next big thing in Enterprise collaboration and with our background in implementing change in large organisation we see Deki Wiki as a very interesting proposition.

Wikis can improve the way people collaborate in the supply chain. No matter if it’s about process descriptions, KPI definitions, work instructions or presenting next weeks lunch menu. And we think we have some great ideas on how to utilize wikis in an ERP-environment. We simply want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Our business has a good grip of Open Source concepts and business models and as a matter of fact we are involved in the translation of Deki Wiki to Swedish.

We are now in the process of expanding our offering to Elvenite’s growing customer base. For example, we are promoting Deki Wiki in our projects and think it would be interesting to see if we can add more value if we had a formal relation with the makers of the product.

So here we are, seeking an opportunity to become a partner to Mindtouch.

If this sounds interesting we would be happy to have a proposal from you about a possible business arrangement.

Med vänlig hälsning/Kind regards

Johan Gotting, CEO & co-founder of Elvenite AB

Elvenite AB
Hälltorp Landet
S-663 41 Hammarö
+XXXXXXXXX
www.elvenite.se

I’m just putting the finishing touches on our new Reseller program. We’ll be certifying MindTouch Gold and Platinum resellers. More information will be published about this in the next week. Also, I’ll soon be announcing partnering software companies who are interested in having MindTouch’s large, and growing, distribution channel (~3000 downloads daily) assist them in spreading their products and services. Selected software partners will have extensions to their product(s) included in the default build of MindTouch Deki Wiki. This will allow users to directly interact with these external services and applications from outside vendors. If you’re interested in either reselling or if you’re a software vendor interested in partnering please contact partners@mindtouch.com. Thanks for your interest in MindTouch and Deki Wiki. As always, please continue to help spread the word by telling colleagues and blogging.

Mashups : MindTouch Deki Wiki
Deki Wiki leverages the Microsoft™ Windows Live™ network of Internet services. In the example, a visitor to the wiki can read a restaurant review and immediately get a map and driving directions from any starting point to the restaurant. The map and directions are obtained dynamically from Microsoft Virtual Earth™ mapping software, using a few simple calls…

Microsoft’s Live team has published a short study of mashups created with Deki Wiki. In this case they show mashups with Microsoft Live Services. Of course, Deki Wiki can connect and mash any number of services or applications. A site admin need only register these external systems, services, or databases and MindTouch Deki Wiki provides the connective tissue and canvas. Our foremost mission at MindTouch is to connect enterprise systems, Web 2.0 applications, and services; thereby allowing users to organize systems and data in a way that makes them better able to complete their objectives. I guess you can say, MindTouch adds the “2.0″ to your enterprise.

Recently at the OSBC conference Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Director of the Open Source Software Lab commented while introducing me for a panel: “We use Deki Wiki in our lab…I wonder why we’re not shipping it.”

Wik.is–our free hosted wiki site–finally made the switchover to not only use Amazon S3 for filestorage but also to allow users to download content directly from S3! Why should you care? Speed! Larger attachments should download much quicker now since you’ll be downloading them directly from Amazon’s data centers rather than our servers slowing it down by being the middleman.

A big thanks to Mike Culver, an evangelist with Amazon web services, for stopping by our office one day and letting us know that this is possible!

Note that nothing changes in the way you should upload or link to images/attachments. If the file is uploaded to the wiki, continue to link directly to the file and don’t worry about S3. When a browser goes to download the file, a redirect to S3’s server is returned with a special temporary signature and expiration that allows the browser to download the file. You may need to tell your users that if they’re sharing a link to the attachment to not share the redirected url to Amazon but rather use the url to the file attachment on the wiki itself. The redirected url currently expires in 1 minute! With these autoexpiring links you can be sure that your uploaded attachments are safe and secure even if you attach to private pages.

If you have a wiki hosted on wik.is, there’s nothing you need to do to enable this as it’s already been applied for every wiki.

Questions or issues? Let us know here or in this thread.

So this week has turned out to be a very exciting week here at MindTouch! We have a film crew in the office and they’re here to document the day-to-day life of a MindTouch employee. Actually, the documentary is going to focus on the MindTouch opensource success story and how MindTouch has accomplished such a large rate of adoption with an extremely limited marketing effort.

For the next four days, we have Randy and Jenny on site, and since they’re going to be interviewing us nonstop, I figured I would reverse the role and put them in the spotlight.

What do you guys do exactly? What is your job?
Randy and Jenny are partners at Foreign American Pictures which is an independent film company. They “work in documentary, animation, graphic design…” Foreign American Pictures is unique because they focus on exposing the true story behind the topic. Simply put, they approach the film with open minds and see what their subjects bring to the table. As they claim, they are “story tellers”. Jenny also added “We don’t want the assignment to control the film” and we “don’t want to squash the unknown.”

What other films have you been working on?
All in all, Randy and Jenny have worked on numerous different projects including commercials, documentaries, music videos, and more. When asked to highlight some films they have worked on, Randy told me about “Agave” which was his student film. I was trying to keep the answers short so Agave, in 10 words or less, was described as “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama” later adding in “looking for his family.” Agave was also a fun project because of the character set. One of their interesting characters was Carel Struycken who has been in movies like “Men In Black” and “The Adams Family Values.” They said that he was “a huge man” with huge feet and that he played Jesus in their film.

The second film they told me about is called Apart from that. “Apart from that” has been featured in over 25 film festivals worldwide including SXSW (South By Southwest), Edinburgh and more…

How did you get started doing documentaries?
Before Jenny and Randy were hired to do documentaries they said that they were “already approaching things as documentaries”. They have always valued a certain level of truth and tried to avoid fabricating a story. Unfortunately, they don’t have too many action scenes. I was hoping for some war scenes stories which they haven’t done yet. However, they have produced some WWF scenes which are equally awesome.

Why is MindTouch being documented?
Jenny - “You guys just get it!!”
Me - “Great answer Jenny, thanks, end of interview…jk”

“You guys are extremely successful, forward thinkers and innovative. You understand how to be open-source.” When I asked Jenny what attracted them to our company she said, “We have overcome the enterprise vs open-source riff” and that we embody values such as “community and loyalty.” Randy went on to add that it’s hard to be “mainstream and innovative at the same time” but MindTouch is bridging the gap.

It has been a lot of fun to have them here as we can showcase not only our company but also our beautiful city. We’re really looking forward to seeing our documentary!

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

While working on our MediaWiki to Deki Wiki converter, I needed to convert a MediaWiki site running in multiple languages. This functionality was implemented using a MediaWiki instance for each language. The approach is problematic since wiki management needs to be handled separately for each language; users had to maintain a user page per language, the same extensions were registered for each instance, common templates could not be leveraged, and there was no easy mechanism for performing cross-language searches. Thus, we were inspired to support multiple languages within a single Deki Wiki instance.

Multi-language support required several new features including a UI that updates automatically based on page language, localized templates, and language-aware search. For more information, refer here. If these features interest you, stay tuned - they will be available in our next major release (1.10).

In This Issue

• MindTouch Deki Wiki "Itasca" Release
• Deki Wiki EC2 Instance (Coming Soon)
• Dream "Emerald" Release
• New Free Deki Wiki hosting

MindTouch Deki Wiki "Itasca" Release

MindTouch Deki Wiki "Itasca" is the first major release since "Hayes" last June. This is an exciting release because it includes many new features, significant performance improvements, usability enhancements, and a new tool that makes it a lot easier to create data mashups and composite applications. I’ll highlight some key new features in this newsletter, but I encourage you to review the full release notes.

• Smart link dialog with auto-linking: select text, click link on Editor Toolbar, Deki Wiki will automatically search pages and file attachments to find the most relevant information.

• Create composite applications and data mashups using a new dialog that gives users access to the more than 100 extensions to applications from Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and more! Without knowing how to program users can stitch together services from all over the web or from within their own Intranet to create situational applications and dynamic reports from multiple data sources and applications.

  For more information about these new dialogs or to see them action watch Guerric's demo video he uploaded to the MindTouch account at Viddler.

• SVN, Mantis, Trac, and Atlassian Jira integration coupled with syntax highlighting for 15 programming languages and the capability to show sample code next to executing code makes Deki Wiki the ultimate software development collaboration platform. With Deki Wiki software engineers, testers and project managers are able to connect several systems and organize their everyday work tools in a manner most efficient to them. Take a look at how we’re using this integration at our developer community, OpenGarden. Or review this sample page:

• Support for Multiple Editors - FCKeditor and TinyMCE. We’re still working out some bugs, but we’re committed to supporting Opera and Safari browsers and both FCKeditor and TinyMCE support these browsers.

• More than 100 bugs squashed and significantly improved performance
• Improved OpenLDAP and eDirectory support
• Internal Group Management
• and more…

Download Deki Wiki now!

or

Upgrade your Deki Wiki

MindTouch Deki Wiki EC2 (Beta)

If you’re not familiar with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it’s a Xen-based virtual hosting solution. Some of its outstanding features include flexible "pay as you go” pricing and a high degree of scalability. Thanks to Deki Wiki’s existing integration with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for file attachments all your files will also be stored by Amazon. In layman terms, this gives you a flexible, easy to manage, and cost efficient way to deploy Deki Wiki on a dedicated server with Amazon as your deployment partner.

To set up Deki Wiki with EC2 you need to have an EC2 account; so, sign up for an account today by visiting Amazon’s Web Services home page. For more information about this innovative and flexible deployment option visit our documentation on this subject.

Dream Emerald (1.5.0) Released

Dream, the foundational technology of MindTouch Deki Wiki also has a new major release named “Emerald”. This is the follow-up version to “Denim” which shipped last September. Since then, we’ve done many improvements to this versatile library and REST micro-server. Dream greatly simplifies REST-oriented programming without introducing abstractions that obfuscate the versatility of HTTP. Dream includes classes such as Plug and XUri that make the WebRequest and Uri/UriBuilder classes obsolete. Dream promotes better programming practices and requires significantly less lines of code. Similarly, the XDoc class is a generalization of XmlDocument, XmlNode, and XmlNodeList that streamlines direct operations on XML documents, alleviating the need for generated wrapper classes. To learn more about MindTouch Dream and the architecture of MindTouch Deki Wiki visit our technology page. Or you can read the Dream "Emerald" release notes.

New Free Deki Wiki Hosting

It's official, you can now get free Deki Wiki hosting, powered by MindTouch, at http://wik.is. This new service is full featured and ad-free. Site registration at Wik.is takes seconds and instantly creates a new Deki Wiki site for authoring and sharing content. This service is ideal for enterprise teams, workgroups, and power users who need a highly usable and functional online tool for sharing information, creating dynamic reports, and building powerful mashups.

Wik.is is free with 100MB of storage, unlimited users, unlimited pages, unlimited access to the API, and, most importantly…did I mention…without advertising! A “Pro” upgrade is available for $99 a year with 10GB of storage and full site customization.

I hope you enjoy the new services and bits and as always, please help us spread the word by re-posting to your blogs, wearing your MindTouch Tshirts, sporting your MindTouch stickers, and just generally telling all your friends about MindTouch. If you don’t have stickers and tshirts contact DamienH [at] MindTouch [dot] com.

I’ve been working on a lot of new skinning features over the last couple months and one of my latest developments is Deki CMS. Deki CMS is a new skin that transforms Deki Wiki into an agile content management system (CMS) and is amazing for individual and collaborative content management.

The current Deki CMS version is the second iteration of the CMS skin which has been powering www.MindTouch.com since September 2007. Since then, we have found that the advanced feature set of Deki Wiki performs excellent as an agile content management system. Here’s a screenshot of Deki CMS highlighting some of its many cool features.

What differentiates Deki CMS from Deki Wiki?
Well, to be honest, not too much, and that’s what makes it so powerful. Deki CMS has 100% of the functionality of Deki Wiki, but it’s only accessible to authorized users, contributors and administrators. Any public or non-authorized user can only see the content, but not edit it.

Does Deki CMS have file revisioning?
Every change you make in Deki CMS is versioned to ensure that your content is protected. Files and image attachments are also versioned. So if you need to upload a new JavaScript file for your homepage drop-down menu or if you need to update your flash demo, Deki CMS keeps track of every change.

How does Deki CMS manage multiple users?
With Deki CMS you can create unlimited users and unlimited user groups which will allow you to manage your website seamlessly. In addition, Deki CMS can also authenticate with LDAP, Joomla, Wordpress, or even your own custom authentication provider, allowing you to easily integrate with your current systems.

Can I extend Deki CMS to integrate with my other application and services?
Absolutely, Deki Wiki and Deki CMS are highly extensible interfaces that are built on top of our distributed application platform. This allows you to easily integrate your existing applications for rich content. On top of integrating your existing applications, Deki Wiki has support for over 100 additional extensions to embed rich content directly into every page.

What about files, images, comments, and tags?
Just like Deki Wiki, each content page allows you to upload file attachments and images. Therefore, if you need to upload an image to include in your content, or if you if you need to reference a JavaScript file, it’s easy to do and also easy to manage. You can also add comments for inter-admin communication on a per-page level. Lastly, you can tag pages to enable easy searching and navigation.

Does Deki CMS support templating?
Of course! Deki CMS has an advanced templating system that allows users to create, include and modify templates on the fly. You can also create parameterized templates to display dynamic pages.

Do you have a Deki CMS screen shot?
I certainly do! - Deki CMS highlights.png

If you have any questions please feel free to drop me an email.

Thanks

Damien
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

I’m hear to say that it’s over and I don’t like it! What’s over you ask? The 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival of course. Damien and I spent the past weekend(+2 days) in Austin, TX talking to industry folks and spreading the good word of Deki Wiki.

All I can say is that the festival was a blast! We met a lot of great people at the interactive expo and late night parties. The participants ranged from desktop users to industry trailblazers and figure heads. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I invite you to peruse several thousand words below.

Till next time,
Guerric