Yesterday, Google announced the general availability of Google App Engine, another option for deploying Cloud Software.

Google App Engine is a great place to create and share extensions for MindTouch Deki. By design, Deki is a distributed application platform that can be extended in any programming language, including C#, PHP, Java, Python, and the built-in DekiScript runtime. Sharing these extensions can be difficult though since you need to find a place to host them. This is were Google App Engine comes in.

Getting started is incredibly simple:

1. Download the App Engine SDK.
2. Create a new application.
3. Add the DekiExt.py file to it.

After that, creating your own extension only takes a few lines of code:

class MyExtension(DekiExt):

# title for the extension
def title(self): return "My Extension"

# a function is exported in the XML manifest
@function("str", "return user greeting")
@param("str", "name of user")
def hello(self, name):
return "Hi " + name

Now upload your extension to your Google App Engine account and voilà, anybody can now benefit from it!

To invoke from MindTouch Deki, just register your extension in the control panel. Now your users can access it by simply typing:

{{ hello("Bob") }}

To learn more how to write your own extensions using Google App Engine, check out the tutorial. Then drop by the developer forums to share your work, ask questions, and provide suggestions. Enjoy!

With all the discussions about about Cloud Computing going on, it’s time to draw lines and explain what the big differences are between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Software.

SaaS: The dawn of Cloud Computing

SaaS has been attractive, because it removes all complexity from installation, deployment, maintenance, is globally accessible, and affordable. By its nature, SaaS resides in the “cloud” and overcomes the traditional headaches of VPNs for efficient collaboration. An added bonus is transparent backups (assuming there is backup strategy).

SaaS is great first step towards Cloud Computing, but it also has an important drawback: control. For all practical purposes, your data is not yours anymore. The SaaS vendor has full control over it; can mine it; and can lock you out of it. For consumers, this is generally not a problem, but for the enterprise, it is a concern.

In short with SaaS, the vendor is in control, not the customer. For the early days of Cloud Computing, that was an acceptable compromise, but times have changed and the cloud has evolved.

Cloud Software: The evolution of Cloud Computing

Cloud Software builds on Cloud Infrastructure (as described in this great post by our friends at RightScale). Similar to SaaS, Cloud Software provides instant gratification, taking mere minutes to be up and running. Depending on the vendor, Cloud Software is as easy to maintain and update as SaaS, and is of course globally accessible.

So what is the big difference? Your data and your application is sitting on servers that you control. There are no restrictions on moving data into or off your Cloud Infrastructure. These servers are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from servers in your physical data center.

What about backups? Cloud Software is designed to be run in the cloud. That means, it already addresses the need to replicate data repositories into the Cloud Storage fabric. Again, you control the Cloud Storage, so you can create additional copies of your data offline if you need to.

What about scaling? Cloud Software is designed to run on one to many machines. That means as your needs increase, you simply add more virtual infrastructure to the mix and voilà!

What about vendor lock-in? Cloud Software doesn’t really care what it runs on. With Cloud Infrastructure, all machines look the same, meaning you can move your application from one provider to another with few limitations. If need be, you can even move it back to your physical data center.

In short, with Cloud Software, the customer is back in control.

Is Cloud Software going to replace SaaS?

The short answers is “no” for the simple reason that SaaS works well when a single machine can services 1,000 to 100,000s of individual users, such as in a consumer setting. In the enterprise, however, Cloud Software has a big advantage. The premium to gain full control over your data and your infrastructure with Cloud Software is simply too low to give SaaS vendors the kind of control they have enjoyed so far. High value applications will transition to Cloud Software because customers want control, while SaaS will continue to supply free or low-cost applications and services.

This also reflects the different options for running MindTouch Deki Wiki. Wik.is is free for up 100MB (or $99/yr for 10GB) with no other restrictions, but the data reside on our servers. Alternatively, you can download Deki Wiki as a certified VMware image or from source code and install it on your servers. Or, you can get the best of both worlds, and launch a Deki Wiki EC2 instance directly in an Amazon.com data center in the cloud

It’s good to have choices!

Hey everybody,

I’m proud to announce the availability of Deki Wiki 8.05.1 RC1 today! Deki Wiki 8.05.1 is an incremental Jay Cooke release with a high focus on improving performance of Deki Wiki. Performance gains were realized primarily in the API to support the millions of pageviews per month for Mozilla’s Developer Center. All of the performance development gains are documented; check it out for details and hard numbers. On our test environment on an Amazon EC2 large instance, we saw performance gains from 8.05 up to 1200%!

Deki Wiki 8.05.1 also includes new functionality like single sign-on utilizing Apache/IIS authentication modules (experimental) which this allows for easy integration with auth systems like NTLM. Extensions now digitally sign requests to extensions, and we can finally authenticate for private RSS feeds! All Javascript libraries that are shipped with Deki Wiki were updated to their latest versions: jQuery 1.2.3, YUI 2.5.1, FCKeditor 2.6.0, and Xinha 0.95.

After consulting with you guys, we’ve decided to focus our attention on FCKeditor as our chosen editor. Starting with the Killen Woods (8.07) release, FCKeditor will be our default editor inside Deki Wiki - this release further stabilized FCKeditor to be used in production systems for aggressive bug testing before we switch it on by default.

The release notes for this release are a part of the Jay Cooke page; and as always, the download is available at SourceForge. Try it out now and let us know if there are any problems before the final release next week!

In an ongoing effort to chronicle MindTouch’s media coverage, return link-love and comment on articles written about MindTouch here’s another weekly media round up.

Starting with Clint Boulton at eWeek. This article is actually a couple weeks old, but I missed it in the previous round ups and I’m a big fan of eWeek and Clint’s work there.

eWeek: Mozilla Melds with MindTouch Wiki

Mozilla’s embrace of MindTouch is a coup of sorts for the San Diego startup…

“They dig it [Deki] because they can connect to disparate systems, presenting through a common interface, and their community being able to write tools on top of that platform for adding content, reviewing content or navigating content,” MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson told eWEEK.

Fulkerson told eWEEK that MindTouch does not want to be mistaken for a social media site, most of which are hosted Internet sites that let users chat and share apps. Users can chat and share apps in MindTouch, but he said 90 percent of the company’s installations are inside the firewall.

I make this distinction about MindTouch being an Enterprise software company and not primarily a social media platform for external community sites because the former is the focus of our development. Although, MindTouch has some highly visible customers who are using MindTouch Deki Wiki as a social media platform the vast majority (90%+) are deploying MindTouch as Enterprise IT connective tissue and an Enterprise wide collaboration tool. When you think about it though there is a lot of overlap between the social media platform and the “Enterprise Glue” use case.

George Dearing of InformationWeek, a seasoned IT professional and blogger, provides his input on MindTouch’s position in the accelerating mashup space.

InformationWeek: MindTouch’s Momentum Shows The Power Of Mashups - Content Management Blog
There’s no question that mashups are hot right now. In fact, it’s a market that Forrester Research’s Oliver Young says could be worth nearly $700 million by 2013. Vendors in every sector are rushing to deliver these so-called “situational applications” to sophisticated business users everywhere in the hopes of improving collaboration and spiking productivity.

A vendor we covered recently and one that’s in the in the middle of mashup mania is MindTouch, makers of Deki Wiki, Web 2.0 middleware that’s part content management system (CMS) and part mashup maker.

Part of my inclination to cover MindTouch’s recent announcement was the results I was able to achieve on my own using Deki Wiki. Pointing and clicking through a hosted instance of its Pro version is a breeze. I was able to build a fairly extensive site with multiple pages, widgets, and several other Web services extensions in less than 30 minutes. Once you navigate through your own instance, you quickly get a sense of what all the fuss is about.

Dion Hinchcliffe, a man whose name is synonymous with Enterprise 2.0 covers MindTouch in a Mashup roundup.

ZDNet | Enterprise Web 2.0: Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature

One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly. One significant open question continues to be how long it will take for rapidly evolving mashup techniques to move into enterprises, which have been falling behind developments on the fast-pace of the consumer Web for a number of years now and are just now beginning to make inroads into some businesses.

…

Mindtouch is primarily known as a wiki company with an aggregation focus, but their new “Itasca” product [Correction: this was actually introduced 7 months earlier in the "Hayes" release] moves them definitely into the mashup space…the wiki makes a good canvas for mashups with automated version control and a familiar usage model that the ordinary user can readily understand…

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes of 10 wiki use cases and several of the examples he cites links to sites powered by MindTouch Deki Wiki.

ReadWriteWeb: Wikis Are Now Serious Business

Wikis are some of the first online social software that many people in the enterprise come in contact with. They can be very popular for project management work. A recent report from Forrester estimated that enterprises spent $63 million on wikis last year, meaning that the consumer wiki provider Wetpaint has now raised 2/3 as much venture capital as the entire enterprise market spent on the medium last year. Forrester predicts though that by 2013, that spending will grow to $451 million - more than will be spent on blog software, podcasting or widgets.

…

Wikis are generally presumed to present nothing but an empty box and a WYSIWYG editor, but that’s not always the case. The online community for book readers Shelfari, for example, recently added a section for author wikis. These author wikis are a combination of free text space and a structured, biographical section.

The software used is called DekiWiki, from Mindtouch. Shelfari doesn’t use the DekiWiki interface, though, it just ties its pages into DekiWiki services. While Wetpaint Inject is getting some press this week, DekiWiki’s API offers more seamless, more powerful integration into partner websites.

In reference to Marshall’s above bolded assertion I’ll add the partner need not pay CPM or have data owned by a third party as is the case with the aforementioned service. Moreover, MindTouch Deki Wiki is open source and easily extensible, which is important as needs evolve and are often unique to each partner.

I was recently interviewed by Geoff Daily of AppRising. We spoke about MindTouch, today and tomorrow, and we discussed the significance of pervasive 100MB broadband to the home. Unfortunately, I can’t embed the video here, but you can watch the video interview at Geoff’s blog. [Geoff assures me he's switching to Viddler--the best video sharing site there is ]. I start off a little slow, but I think the interview gets pretty interesting once I get comfortable with the format.

If anyone knows of a tutorial for creating this format (picture in picture video chat) with Skype Video, at a reasonable quality level, please let me know. I’d like to start doing this and think the format is wonderful.

Next, OSalt.com added MindTouch Deki Wiki to their site. OSalt isn’t a media outlet, but I want to mention it here because I think it’s a wonderful service. The site lists open source software to proprietary alternatives. You like how I turned that around don’t you.

Lastly, I want to provide some link-love and close the round up with Sean Lew’s personal blog post, which I stumbled across today courtesy of Technorati.

Synergise IT: MindTouch Frenzy

I looked at a HUGE amount of Wikis. TikiWiki, PhPWiki, SocialText, WetPaint, MediaWiki and Mindtouch. I have personally either installed or tried the online versions of all of them and decided on Mindtouch Deki Wiki hosted on Wik.is. Even though that means I have to pay $99 per year for only 10GB of space. Oh well, good things comes at a price.

I cannot emphasize enough how simple Deki Wiki is. Creating content is simple, managing the Wiki is super easy as well. It also has the power to extend its platform to add almost anything under the sun is something NO OTHER WIKI can do. Simplicity and power at its best!

You don’t have to be a professional journalist or blogger to write about MindTouch. Hearing from users and customers in the trenches is very valuable. Keep posts like Sean’s coming and I’ll always try my best to get you into the Media Round Up.

There’s a few people here at MindTouch who’ve been working very hard for the last couple of months to relaunch www.mindtouch.com. It’s long overdue. MindTouch.com really doesn’t communicate the depth, breadth, or value of MindTouch’s software. The site also doesn’t really tell the story of all the amazing ways people are using MindTouch Deki Wiki. So, of course, the site doesn’t really speak to our users and community.

It’s clear MindTouch users and customers fall into three distinct categories.

1. IT admin, manager, or director. This is our largest user segment. This group also represents the largest percentage of users that are using MindTouch Deki Wiki as an integration platform. This group prefers MindTouch to other offerings because it’s the only platform that allows users to register external apps and services easily. For them it’s about IT governance and these folks regularly tell us that with MindTouch Deki Wiki they’ve gotten business units actively using MindTouch in way they haven’t been able to with other offerings.
2. Power User. This is most often a business user who is tech-savvy and mostly interested in improving his team or department’s productivity. These folks most often use our VMware appliance or the free hosted site at www.wik.is. This audience prefers MindTouch over other offerings because the user experience is vastly superior and MindTouch is the only offering that delivers the ability to create mashups with point and click ease.
3. Developer. These are software developers who are either using the services layer of MindTouch Deki Wiki to develop entirely new social applications or they’re building new functionality into the platform to suit their specialized needs, such as workflow, etc…

We’re in early drafts of the new copy for the website, which we plan to launch in June. Irene, the new website manager, and I were tossing around ideas for imagery to use throughout the copy. Some early ideas were: geeky looking IT guys, super heroes and pirates (I like pirates–ninjas are lame). Keep in mind, we’re only talking about imagery to use on the website and not the overall theme of the website. Pirates were, obviously, over the top, but just think: the IT Governance Pirate: “Aarrrrr…”. I liked the super hero idea and it could be done tastefully and professionally, but Microsoft has this ongoing heroes campaign now so we had to scrap that idea. What did we decide on? Well, we know who our users and customers are. Upon reflection we realized we have one of each of these arch-types in our company. Why not use our co-workers as models for the website!? Brilliant!

Before you judge too harshly the photos below keep in mind: we are not using these photos, but these are some of the more amusing photos Rion, Jessica and Roy took during the photo shoot. The photos we use at MindTouch.com will not be so silly, but I hope you enjoy these.

MindTouch will blow your mind away!!! | Web 2.x Blog

So is MindTouch just another entrance into the red ocean plethora of WIKIs lying around? No.

MindTouch is fully based on a SOA architecture. It is written in C#, and uses the MONO framework to allow it to operate in all major UNIX-based operating systems out there (MAC OS X, Linux, Solaris). The SOA architecture means the hooks into the software are all fully based on web or REST services !!!! Here are few reasons why I think MindTouch will stand out compared to other WIKI systems:-

1. The web services approach allows ease of integration with external systems. E.g. A WIKI page for a technical lead showing the latest snapshot of the statistics of the number of code activity in subversion, as well as testing activity from a online test management system called Mantis.
2. This ease of integration leads to MindTouch being a powerful platform for Enterprise Mashups
3. MindTouch still persists the functionality that you would typically find in a WIKI system.
4. MindTouch requires no configuration (except admin username/password) at all. It’s a simple deployment that’s done through VMWare Workstation. Plug the VM image in the workstation, click play. Dead simple.

MindTouch surely is not the conventional WIKI that we all imagine it to be. It’s much more than a WIKI. It differentiates itself with other key players by having the ability to plug and play services exposed by other information systems.

Thanks for for the write up and kind words.

Well, I know Matt says: “open source is all about…people” in this fabulous video he produced, but MHinkle made the soylent green reference and I’m trying to make use of that Discrete Math class I took in college that I don’t get much use out of now that I’m in management.

MindTouch needs your help to get Jott integrated with Deki Wiki. Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. They have integration with other applications like Twitter and Remember the Milk to name a few. Deki Wiki is being proposed as another option that they would offer with their sevice. This would allow a user to call their service and leave a message that would then be transcribed and posted to a wiki page. This is beneficial for anyone that wants to add comments or notes tied to Deki Wiki applications like project management, Knowledge Base, or any use of Deki Wiki where you’d like to capture information in the wiki when you are not at your computer. In order to have Deki Wiki considered for this we need you to send an email to them expressing your interest in an addition like this to their plugins. The email needs to be sent to feedback [at] jott [dot] com

Here is a sample email to use when emailing Jott:

Hello,

I use Deki Wiki and am interested in being able to use Jott with it. I understand that you accept ideas for Jott Links to connect Jott to existing Web Services. I’d like to nominate Deki Wiki for your next Jott Link extension. [feel free to add an example of how it would benefit you]

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

[your name]

MindTouch is currently hiring sales engineers to help grow our customer base. We need enthusiastic, friendly, extroverted and technical people to follow up with potential customers. Our goal is to build relationships with our user community and convert to customers those who have a real need for vendor backed support. This is not a hard-sale, sales position. Ideal candidates have a broad knowledge of current “Web2.0″ services and technologies. Understand wikis, blogs, and the difference between taxonomy and folksonomy. Familiarity or prior experience in groupware, collaboration, publishing, and content or knowledge management is a strong plus. Must have hand’s on experienced in the entire sales cycle, from leads generation to closing, with particular expertise in selling, maintaining customer relationships and renewing support subscriptions.

Responsibilities:

• Contact potential customers and qualify them via phone, email, or in person
• Meet regular sales goals
• Ability to give web based demos
• Work at our headquarters in San Diego
• Maintain salesforce.com for all accounts and prospects

Requirements:

• 3 or more years selling services, software and / or technology
• Ability to meet regular sales goals and quotas
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Experience with CRM systems like ACT, Salesforce, or SugarCRM
• (optional but desirable) Knowledge of wikis and open source software

If these descriptions fit you, please submit a resume to jobs [at] mindtouch [dot] com

We are seeking a self-motivated, enthusiastic Community Manager with a strong technical background to support our rapidly growing user community and external networks. As the Community Manager, you will be the catalyst for external communication, networking and events across our users, partners and other interested technology parties. As the product and user advocate across a broad and growing base, a thorough understanding of the processes and technologies used for web infrastructure, as well as superior communication and organizational skills are critical. As the primary interface to all users and prospective customers, the Community Manager will demonstrate the ability to exceed expectations in a fast paced, startup environment where he/she will be a valuable contributor to the company’s overall growth and success.

Responsibilities

• Maintain active community communication through newsletters, webinars, blogs, social media and forum posts
• Coordinate all efforts regarding the wiki, forums, blogs and similar community tools
• Provide strategy and thought leadership in external networks by actively listening and responding quickly to key partner, technology and user postings as well as developing deep networking relationships
• Drive the strategy and execution for expanding community activity and product adoption
• Organize and execute all community events including online events, community meetups and conferences
• Advocate community issues and product requests internally. Advise internal stakeholders of important trends and events in the community, using key data and statistics gathered from the community

Qualifications

• Experience with online communities and/or technical support for consumer web applications
• Technological knowledge and experience with web 2.0 applications including both consumer and enterprise technologies.
• Expertise using social media and consumer-driven content such as wikis, web feeds, blogs, forums, and podcasts
• Overall development experience using xml, php and C#.
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail
• This role requires strong collaboration with marketing, engineering and support, so exceptional and demonstrated cross-group collaboration skills are required
• Other important strong skills include a passion for customers, strategic thinking and driving for results
• Ability to travel up to 10-15% for conferences
• Bachelors degree

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com