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.

categories: MindTouch