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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.