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In This Issue

• MindTouch Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” v.8.5 RC1
• MindTouch RPM’s and Amazon AMI
• Continued Record Growth
• “MindTouch Puts the Enterprise in 2.0″
• Desktop Connector
• MindTouch Enterprise Subscriptions

MindTouch Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” RC1

Deki Wiki Jay Cooke (v8.5) is the latest release from MindTouch. We’ll be making an official announcement about “Jay Cooke” next week that will include details about the exciting new features of this release. Suffice it to say you can access RC1 from SVN. Being that I don’t want to spill all the beans about this new and very innovative release of Deki Wiki I’m only sharing a couple minor items about this release now. The full scope of the release will be revealed next week.

As always, we at MindTouch place a great emphasis on user experience. As avid users of our own software, we’ve been perennially aggravated by the inability to attach files while editing a page. It’s perfectly reasonable to upload a screenshot when writing technical documentation. Well, you finally can! Not only that, but our new file uploader allows you to do multi-file selection uploads and shows a progress bar. This blows away the previous user experience for file uploads and sets a new bar for others. See for yourself:

The only other item I’ll share with you about the “Jay Cooke” release is about the new versioning scheme we’re employing. Being an alert, avid fan of Deki Wiki, you’ve probably noticed our versioning went from 1.9.0 (Itasca) to 8.5 (Jay Cooke). To quell any concerns: no, we didn’t secretly release 7 versions of our software that you’ve missed. We’ve decided to adopt the Ubuntu versioning scheme – the first two numbers correspond to the year and the month of each release. Since Jay Cooke officially releases on May 6th, we’ve labeled it the 8.5 version. We feel that this is a more logical way to version releases, rather than using arbitrary numbers, which can be ambiguous.

MindTouch RPMs and Amazon AMI

MindTouch has regularly received complaints from our community that installation from source code is prohibitively complex. We’ve listened to your concerns and I’m very pleased to report that this will no longer be the case. Thanks to the hard work of Bob and Mathieu there are now RPMs for all major Linux distributions complete with official installation guides, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)–still in beta–that makes kicking off an instance of Deki Wiki on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) infrastructure a snap and an updated official VMware installation guide. If you’re considering deploying Deki Wiki with the AMI I strongly encourage you to employ the assistance of Right Scale. They deliver easily manageable solutions on AWS and are a strong MindTouch partner. We hope you enjoy these new installation tools; please let us know what you think.

Continued Record Growth

Thanks in no small part to our community of users, developers, and customers, MindTouch has continued to grow at a remarkable pace. Some key metrics from the last quarter:

• Resellers in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland and Japan
• Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase
• Installs on all major Linux distributions
• More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community
• Translated into 16 languages

With your help we’ll continue to develop cutting edge software and provide low-cost Enterprise support. Your assistance in spreading the word about MindTouch technologies with blog posts, installs, emails, and comments is invaluable to us.

“MindTouch Puts the Enterprise in 2.0″

Recently there was an article at InformationWeek about MindTouch. I provided commentary on the article at the MindTouch blog, but I’d like to expound on this for you now. In case you still think MindTouch Deki Wiki is just a wiki, allow me to clarify. Yes, it is a wiki, but it’s also an application integration platform and an application development platform. A very large percentage of MindTouch Deki Wiki users are using it to connect teams, enterprise systems, and Web 2.0 applications. They’re doing this with situational applications, dynamic report templates and by providing alternative interfaces to a variety of legacy systems that are inherently difficult to use. Mostly, this is not programmers doing this: these are IT professionals and power users that work in business groups. In these cases the wiki is more of a canvas to a distributed application platform or a kind of enterprise connective tissue. Many of our users are, in short, are using MindTouch to add the “2.0″ to their enterprise, and are doing so with IT governance.

Specifically, users are employing MindTouch to connect databases, ECM, CRM, Microsoft Access and Excel with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, and other online services. I prefer to think of this as MindTouch delivering a Social Enterprise Platform that empowers the IT department to regain some control they’ve lost to the growing usage of Web 2.0 point applications and the business users to be given some control over how they access internal data and use enterprise applications. Bottom line: MindTouch users are realizing much more value from their existing systems and human resources because of MindTouch Deki Wiki and the IT department who is exposing legacy systems and other applications through MindTouch. Are you benefiting from MindTouch Deki Wiki in this way? If you want to learn more about MindTouch providing connective tissue to your enterprise IT infrastructure jump into the MindTouch Forums and see how other IT professionals and business users are using MindTouch Deki Wiki to connect systems. Or just contact us directly.

Desktop Connector

If you aren’t already using it, be certain to check out the MindTouch Desktop Connector. This free Microsoft Windows desktop tool allows users to drag and drop files, or entire directory structures directly into a Deki Wiki. The Desktop Connector recreates the entire directory structure on the fly and attaches files to the appropriate pages. This tool is prefect for creating and organizing wiki pages on the fly or for transferring lots of files to Deki Wiki. This works with Deki Wiki “Hayes” and later releases and is compatible with the MindTouch Online offering at www.wik.is. Download today it’s very useful and is robust in features. If you’re a programmer, check out the source code for the Desktop Connector from SVN. It operates on the Deki Wiki API and gives you a great example of how easy it is  build on the Deki Wiki platform.

MindTouch Enterprise Subscriptions

Finally, I want to encourage any enterprise users to immediately contact us about MindTouch Enterprise subscriptions. If you’re team, organization, or enterprise is relying on Deki Wiki you will be well advised to evaluate them. These subscriptions immediately pay for themselves by saving your team time and money. Moreover, they provide the less tangible, but equally important piece of mind and security. Pricing of MindTouch Enterprise subscriptions was updated and a new plan added at the beginning of April. The newest plan is the MindTouch Enterprise Platinum plan that provides some very valuable Enterprise services, including our new MindTouch “Go Live” Certification, improved response time, and escalation. The “Go Live” Certification is the best way to insure your Deki Wiki install is optimally configured and secured. Contact us today about this.

As previously mentioned, MindTouch was recently exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo where I was interviewed by the local news station KRON Channel 4.

Excuse my appearance. I’m usually dressed a little better (no hat) and I’m typically a lot more enthusiastic, but I was teetering on the brink of complete collapse from a Flu that I picked up at the show (Flu 2.0). I’m just now beginning to recover.

In general, the Expo was fantastic for MindTouch. We had many customers and even more users stop by our booth, or just give a shout out as they walked by–”I’m a user! Love it!” true story. Moreover, we’ve already added a couple new customers and there are many other companies sure to convert as a result of the show . The MindTouch booth was constantly mobbed with traffic to the point that the four of us in the booth couldn’t even keep up with the volume. It’s clear we need a bigger booth next year. By the end of Expo Day One we had to have more business cards and schwag overnight mailed to us from our office in San Diego. To give you some idea of how many people we spoke with, we burned through more than 400 business cards in the first 3.5 hours of the first day!

One final note, to all of you whom I infected with Flu 2.0, which I too caught at the show, I’m sorry. It wasn’t until Wednesday night I even knew I had it at which time I was very careful not to shake hands with anyone.

I returned late Friday night from a week of networking and socializing that left me exhausted and ready for bed. Needless to say it was an awesome event that was jam packed with exciting “Web 2.0″ news and many of the web’s top names.

The expo took place from Tuesday to Friday. As it is one of the larger expo’s of the year the attendees were in no short supply. Etelos, Microsoft and IBM took the big booths and scattered amongst the crowd were companies like Coghead, Mashable, Bungee Connect, Technorati and yours truly, MindTouch. As always we didn’t let the other vendors get in our way. Everything from our live demos to our 6′ rabbit had people swarming to us. Fortunately for us the most common response was “wow”.

I wasn’t able to attend any of the sessions, however, my twitter friends kept me fully informed. Coincidentally, there was apparently a terrific session on twitter and I thought the deliverance was fairly innovative. The presenter kept a full screen view of his twitter account on the screen and addressed questions from the audience as they were tweeted in. Fairly unique if you ask me!

As was expected, the late night agenda of socializing was plentiful. Tuesday night was the Digg Party, Wednesday the Mashable/Chi.mp party and Thursday was the highly talked about NetVibes party. Each event seemed to be a who’s who of social media as technology leaders and “weblebrity’s” were everywhere. I personally enjoyed the NetVibes event the most which closed down around 2am and was packed with technology superstars. Fortunately the only commonality between the events were the MindTouch stickers plastered all over everyone and everywhere.

Overall Web 2.0 proved to be one of the better events of the year. I met a ton of great people and MindTouch was undeniably very noticed. Our next big show is OSCON which takes place in mid July in Portland, Oregon. If you’re going to be there drop me an email (damienH[at]mindtouch.com) and I’ll make sure I bring you one of our infamous “rabbits” t-shirts.

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

Wikis are one of the most searched web mediums of today which is an expected occurrence because of the breadth of rich contextual information. Although the leading search engines emphasize actual context over meta data there are many search engines that still rely on meta data to classify and rank pages. For this reason we have created a set of new SEO functions that enable users to add per page meta data to each wiki page. Not only does this assist with search engine optimization but it also allows for a more granular identity of the content presented on each page. Additionally, it’s just considered good practice.

The functions allow you to identify the following meta data:

• Author
• Copyright
• Custom
• Description
• GoogleBot
• Keywords
• Rating
• Robots

You can access each function by navigating to the “Insert Extension Dialog” on your edit page toolbar (under Built In functions) or by inserting the appropriate Deki Script directly into you wiki page. Here is an example of how to use Deki Script to change the meta data.

• {{ meta.author{content: “Damien Howley”} }}
• {{ meta.description{content: “This is my unique wiki page about SEO”} }}
• {{ meta.keywords{content: “SEO,MindTouch,Deki Wiki,Wiki,Awesome”} }}

Thanks, and happy SEO

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

A few weeks ago MindTouch and OBM hosted a party at the MySQL conference in Santa Clara. While the venue was a tad seedier than we expected the turn out was still great. We had a wonderful time with our good friends from OBM and Linagora. It was also great making new friends with people from Media Temple, MySQL, Acquia, MiniClip, Photo Gallery, GoDaddy, Sun, Zmanda, and many other companies and open source projects that attended the event. Bub.blicio.us showed up as well to chronicle the event. 

I had a talk with George Dearing from InformationWeek last week. Him being well-versed in Enterprise IT made the conversation lively because he totally understood what MindTouch is delivering to the Enterprise IT infrastructure. George writes:

MindTouch Puts The Enterprise In 2.0 - Content Management Blog - InformationWeek

It’s not often you hear terms like application integration and IT governance from companies building their businesses on Web 2.0 underpinnings such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. So I was somewhat surprised to be smacked in the face with just that from Aaron Fulkerson, the tech-talking co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a company that wants to be the “tissue” that helps enterprises connect all those disparate systems.

…

My first thought was why isn’t everybody doing this stuff? For starters, it’s because creating scalable Web architectures isn’t for the faint of heart. Fulkerson says the founders’ backgrounds in distributed systems helps it deliver on the promise of easy-to-use interfaces and IT-friendly integration.

…

So how is MindTouch making friends with both business and IT? For IT, the pitch is simple; make their lives easier by empowering them to add governance not just over the wiki, but over all of their applications. In that sense, Deki Wiki, says Fulkerson, becomes not only an integration layer but a common user interface across different applications. The heavy emphasis on integration is a calculated move by MindTouch, one it knows will not only pique the interest of CTOs across the land, but put it head-to-head with middleware heavyweights such as BEA Systems and IBM.

..

The other side of the social enterprise equation involves the user experience. I asked Fulkerson how MindTouch manages to appease business users.

“We’re allowing customers to add this 2.0 social layer to existing enterprise applications. That adds a tremendous amount of value to the organization because users can interact with applications much easier through common interfaces and processes,” he said.

In case you still think MindTouch Deki Wiki is just a wiki allow me to clarify. Yes, it is a wiki, but it’s also an application integration platform and an application development platform. A very large percentage of MindTouch Deki Wiki users are using it to connect teams, enterprise systems, and Web 2.0 applications. Their doing this with dynamic report templates, situational applications and by providing alternative interfaces to a variety of legacy systems that are inherently difficult to use. In these cases the wiki is more of a canvas to a distributed application platform or a kind of enterprise connective tissue. MindTouch users are realizing much more value from their existing systems and human resources. The IT department is facilitating this while maintaining unprecedented governance. A smaller percentage of users are developing entirely new applications on MindTouch Deki Wiki. These folks are using the software as an alternative to BEA Weblogic. I’ll write about this at another time.

In reference to how our customers are using MindTouch Deki Wiki as enterprise glue, George mused:

“This is exactly what we were trying to do in the Enterprise IT infrastructure back in 1997–centralize and integrate. This is great!”

He’s absolutely correct. Except we’ve taken a decidedly different approach that delivers far more benefits to the IT department at a much lower price point. Specifically, previous enterprise integration products were very much focused on centralizing systems. These were almost entirely closed systems and they’ve all taken a systems view. MindTouch is an open platform, not to be confused with insecure–this means adhering to open standards, takes a distributed approach and allows users to create a very people-centric view of systems and data. MindTouch, rather than centralizing and thereby creating vendor lock-in as well as additional burden on the IT dept, allows an IT professional to connect systems and allow users to be able to organize systems and data to suit their needs and their processes. And because it’s so easy to create situational apps and reports these can be iterated on and adapted as needs change. MindTouch is allowing IT professionals to provide governance over their existing enterprise systems, databases, and Web 2.0 applications while allowing users to get at the data they need in the way that suits them best.

Why aren’t other vendors taking the same approach as MindTouch? What we’ve engineered is really hard. Also, we saw the need and trends coalescing early on and our backgrounds in distributed systems research made use well positioned to engineer a solution. For more information read the MindTouch Technology page.

Jeremy Thomas of Social Glass kindly covered MindTouch’s recent announcement and commented on my generally recognized disdain for the “2.0″ moniker.

Social Glass » Mindtouch Puts Up Some Impressive Numbers

Mindtouch’s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger.

Jeremy’s correct. I really do not like the “2.0″ moniker; although I was recently tasked with providing technical edits for a book Jeremy and Aaron Newman wrote titled: “Enterprise 2.0 Implementation” for McGraw Hill. The book is fantastic and I’m very honored to have been asked to help with it’s completion. Anyway, the 2.0 assignment to Enterprise software is, of course, an intentional connection to Web 2.0. When are we going to get past this silly name? It’s trendy and well, just silly. The fact is software is increasingly being developed with a mind toward simplicity, ease of use and with a social component. This is true for consumer web applications and enterprise software. I prefer the more, in my opinion, timeless title: “Social Enterprise Software”. Quite frankly I think by 2011 we’ll all be looking back at this “2.0″ obsession as the Members-Only jackets of software.

Anyway, Jeremy provides a short summary of our MindTouch Deki Wiki in the post too.

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Thanks for the write up Jeremy and for calling out my “2.0″ bigotry.

Hello to all you MindTouch users! I’m Jessica, the User Experience Designer, here to give the Deki Wiki interface (the overall look and ease of use) a makeover. I’m tackling the Control Panel right now, so if any of you would like to be involved with usability testing (which can be done remotely) or just give feedback, please send me a message!

I want to make your experience with the Control Panel easy, not frustrating. Have a pet peeve? Wish we’d add a feature? Start critiquing the heck out of this thing! The more we hear from you, the better it will be. So here’s your chance to vent about what’s been bugging you (and praise us for what you may like).

Check out the screenshots of the proposed ideas over at OpenGarden and let us know what you think!

MindTouch Primed to Accelerate Market Expansion as It Achieves Segment Leading Customer Growth and Market Successes

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & SAN DIEGO–MindTouch, the company behind the most sophisticated wiki available today is delivering the most full-featured application platform. MindTouch Deki Wiki, which empowers everyday users to create real-time reports and integrate systems quickly, while preserving IT governance, has set major new benchmarks for company growth in the most recent calendar quarter ending March 31. This quarter was MindTouch’s largest ever with respect to sales, revenue, and enterprise deployments – and is the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing sales. MindTouch is showcasing Deki Wiki this week at the MySQL Conference and Expo.

Impressive Corporate Growth

In less than two years, MindTouch has gained mass global adoption in several enterprise market segments from media publishers, software, CE, online businesses, research/education institutions to U.S. government agencies and armed forces. With strong global partners and established commercial integrators in more than six countries MindTouch achieved significant increases in key corporate performance measures, including number of new clients added, enterprise deployments, resellers, and consumer downloads. Some of the impressive growth benchmarks include:

• Resellers in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland and Japan, - 400 percent increase
• Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase
• Installs on all major Linux distributions – 600 percent increase
• More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase
• Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase

MindTouch saw a rise in enterprise deployments across its portfolio of Fortune 500 industry clients. Representative clients include many industry leaders, such as:

• FedEx
• Fujitsu
• Siemens
• Microsoft Corporation
• Gannette
• U.S. Army
• Department of Defense
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• City Of Los Angeles
• EMC

Many industry analysts, including Gartner, have projected wikis will be used by more than half of the world’s enterprises by the end of 2009.

“MindTouch has emerged as the clear frontrunner in the social enterprise space. The alignment of market demand fit perfectly with our unparalleled product offerings,” said Aaron Fulkerson MindTouch CEO and founder. “Our adoption rate and increase in enterprise deployments coupled with continued market expansion has set the stage for strong, sustained growth in 2008 and beyond.”

About MindTouch

MindTouch, recognized the world over for innovation beyond open source wiki collaboration and content management to delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform. MindTouch Deki Wiki, built with a Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), enables users to connect teams, enterprise systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications with IT governance. Users easily access and organize data and systems efficiently to achieve their business objectives.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is deployed by Fortune 500 companies, major media, research/education institutions, government agencies, and online businesses worldwide. Customers include Microsoft, Fujitsu, Siemens, Gannette, FedEx, U.S. Army, DoD, and others. MindTouch is committed to delivering next generation solutions to people, businesses and governments. For more information about our company, people and innovations, visit http://mindtouch.com/.

Redmond Developer News | Open Source .NET Projects Getting Cold Shoulder?
Jeff contends that “open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem.” He says Microsoft is not only wrong to withhold support from open source projects that contribute to the .NET universe; he believes Microsoft’s fate as a dev tools provider hinges on the company changing its approach.

It’s a point worth discussion. Dev shops worldwide rely on diverse open source tools like DotNetNuke, MbUnit, NAnt, NHibernate and ZedGraph, just to name a few. And yet, for all of Microsoft’s efforts to embrace, welcome and work with the open source community (CodePlex, the IronPython and IronRuby projects, Mono development, etc.), it’s clear that the .NET-aligned, open source developer community isn’t feeling the love from Redmond.

I think there is a change underway with respect to Microsoft’s perception of open source and open source .NET projects. In fact, they’ve been very helpful to MindTouch, www.MindTouch.com, which is developed on .NET and deployed on Linux (Mono). As evidence of Microsoft’s growing enthusiasm for open source I will direct you to www.microsoft.com/OpenSource (you will notice MindTouch prominently featured), the open source lab, and Port25.

It’s an absolute certainty that if Microsoft does not embrace open source they run the risk of becoming irrelevant because it is on open source that innovative development is taking place. Clearly this is due to the prevalence of open source in University CS deptartments. We come up through the University developing using open source technology; of course, we’re going to continue using these tools and platforms into our professional career. Microsoft has already made itself largely irrelevant in the Web 2.0 space. After all, who uses .NET in this space?

I will agree that Microsoft still has a long way to go to improve their involvement and support of open source developers on .NET, but it’s clear there are senior people who are aware of the importance of open source. Also, it’s clear that building open source on .NET can be disadvantageous due to a stigma in some segments and a limited set of projects, libraries, and components to incorporate. However, I expect to see a growing affinity to open source from Microsoft and, unlike some who are sporting tin foil hats, I do not believe this is caused by nefarious machinations.