I’m long overdue for a MindTouch media coverage round up. There’s a lot that have slipped through the cracks in the last couple months. Sorry for returning the link-love to those I missed. Anyway, with the announcement of our upcoming MindTouch Deki “Kilen Woods” release (RC1 forthcoming any day) it makes sense to lasso the media and analyst coverage from last week into a succinct post for our blog audience to read what others think about our work. Clearly, last weeks announcement that was timed for the O’Reilly open source conference (OSCON) was well received with a lot of great publications picking up the story and providing commentary. In no particular order here’s some excerpts and link-love:

MindTouch offers new enterprise collaboration platform
By Mary A. C. Fallon

[MindTouch Deki] provides adapters to popular IT and developer systems, like customer relationship management software (CRM), behind company firewalls and “in the cloud.” The new enterprise version, available at the end of July, allows sophisticated IT governance regardless of where information is stored.

Fulkerson…calls the Kilen Woods Deki “a collaboration canvas” companies can use to build dynamic documents mashing up search results, maps, spreadsheets, customer databases, and a variety of other information. These dynamic mash-ups could help businesses generate sales leads, manage real estate properties or product inventories, create employee knowledge bases and build and track marketing campaigns, he said. The Deki dynamic reports can display information graphically so, for example, numbers in a spreadsheet can show as a bar or pie chart. Information can be displayed in 16 major languages.

The Kilen Woods Deki (MindTouch names products after Minnesota state parks) offers a dozen enterprise adapters to a various systems and new Web services including SugarCRM, salesforce.com, LinkedIn, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Microsoft ADO.NET, VisiFire, PrinceXML, ThinkFree Office, and WordPress. The enterprise version improves workflow because users setting up the templates no longer have to write software code outside the MindTouch application, Fulkerson said.

DaniWeb: “MindTouch Deki: A ‘Why-Didn’t-I-Think-Of-That’ Enterprise Solution
by Lisa Hoover

I’ve read about, reported on, and used plenty of enterprise-edition tools [...]. Many of them are wonderful products in their own right, but they often have one thing in common: they’re very singular. That is, they address a specific need or provide a targeted solution, but data and output can’t often be mind across applications in a useful way. Put into practice, what MindTouch Deki offers is a way to access all that random data you have spread across applications and ties it all together in ways that mean something to your company’s bottom line.

ITBusinessEdge: New Release of MindTouch Wiki Draws Praise for Easy Integration
by Loraine Lawson

MindTouch is hoping to capture the top spot as a collaborative wiki platform with a new release of Deki, the “Kilen Woods” version. Its not-so-secret weapon against top competitor MediaWiki: integration with Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, LinkedIn, GoogleEarth and other big-name offerings.

eWEEK: MindTouch Wiki Integrates Salesforce.com, LinkedIn
By Clint Boulton

MindTouch has come a long way since launching its Deki wiki platform at OSCON 2007. This anniversary release mashes up disparate enterprise systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications, allowing workers to leverage these assets to enrich the projects they collaborate on.

Deki features the same wiki interface as always. The magic occurs behind the scenes, where the company has written a dozen adapters that enable users to tap various systems and Web services from within the wiki.

CNET: MindTouch Deki’s new release integrates…just about everything
by Matt Asay

MindTouch has always thought that a wiki should be about more than simply creating basic web pages. With its new “Kilen Woods” release, the company has significantly bent the rules as to what constitutes a wiki, and just which data sources can feed into a wiki.

TechCrunchIT: MindTouch Revamps Enterprise Collaboration Platform
by Cameron Christoffers

The platform requires some technical acumen, but for the most part it simplifies some very complex interactions. For example, users are able to drag and drop directory structures from Windows to MindTouch and the hierarchy will be automatically created as wiki pages. Users can also publish an entire email thread from Microsoft Outlook to MindTouch Deki in a single click.

Tranpalitu: Kilen Woods Deki
by Marcos Pozo

MindTouch ya ha anunciado la presentación de la siguiente versión de su Deki Wiki, de nombre Kilen Woods. Llevará bastantes plugins con una clara orientación a la creación de mashups entre los que se incluyen para SalesForce, SugarCRM y para la base de datos Access.

BCDN: MindTouch Deki, a Programmable Wiki

In other words, web-dev geeks like us can safely customize or extend the UI without risk of interfering with Deki’s business logic, such as page permissions or revisions. Coooool! Oh, and did we mention that it’s Free Software?

GCN: MindTouch has updated its advanced Wiki software, MindTouch Deki
by Joab Jackson

The new adapters will allow the software to draw information more easily from software such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Microsoft ADO.NET, SugarCRM, ThinkFree Office and WordPress, as well as Web services such as Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. Information drawn from these applications can be used as input by other Web services applications, such as Microsoft Live Earth or Google Maps.

RedMonk: MindTouch’s Deki Release - The Mashup Marketing Delima
by Michael Coté

The other, over-riding principal of Deki compared to traditional content middleware platforms is a focus on being open and simple. Deki is built in a very web-native feeling way, trying to keep APIs and data as open and accessible as possible, pulling towards transparency in those processes, if not, human-understandability. This contrasts to systems that require binary protocols and APIs or overly complex Web Services schemes. That is, Deki has a REST-y feel to it rather than a WS-* feel.

Info-Tech Research: Five Ways To Wiki For Business
by Timothy Hickernell

IT leaders, however, still wonder what a business wiki looks like in practice.

Info-Tech presents and analyzes five case studies representing a range of different industries and solutions, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) and open source options. This includes the following usage scenarios: [...]

Case Study 1: Wiki as Collaboration Platform
Usage: Until recently, the firm used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to create and manage team workspaces. MindTouch has now replaced SharePoint for this function.

The firm uses a second instance of MindTouch to fulfill its external information-sharing needs. The wiki is now an integral channel for communication with clients.

Results: The cost estimate for expanding and customizing the existing SharePoint implementation to include external collaboration was $20,000, excluding ongoing costs. Deployment time would have been measured in weeks, if not months. Initial costs for MindTouch Deki Wiki (open source with commercial services and support) were less than half the SharePoint estimate. Deployment was completed in less than one week.

The firm reported that the solution met all of its client communication needs and increased employee productivity within the firm.

MarketWatch: MindTouch Releases MindTouch Deki “Kilen Woods”

Site administrators simply need to register external applications, and business users - without any technical knowledge or background in programming - can immediately create powerful mashups, easy-to-use templates, dynamic reports and dashboards that can be shared and used among colleagues, customers, and suppliers. By connecting existing applications in new ways, MindTouch Deki helps businesses get more value from their applications and infrastructure.

OnDemand Beat: MindTouch Deki Adds Enterprise Integration To Wiki Platform
by Ameed Taylor

This new functionality helps MindTouch Deki jump to the front in terms of competing Wiki Platforms as now within a single platform users can create mashups, dashboards, reports etc from within the Wiki interface. This type of enterprise integration will make Wiki’s (if more Wiki platforms are able to catch up with MindTouch and add this type of integration in the future) an easier sell for companies as integration with existing applications is always at the top of the list of wanted features.

ZDNet: MindTouch Deki: Kilen Woods release
by Dennis Howlett

I’m impressed with MindTouch Deki. Fulkerson’s passion, but more important his understanding of the need for fast track mashups and integrations shines through in the product. This is way beyond where many wikis are going. It elegantly shows the potential for getting information out of siloes and have those data become part of broader, light weight applications that solve many of the business supply chain problems that have been difficult to overcome using traditional integration methods.

LinuxInsider: MindTouch Sharpens Its Deki App Masher
by Jack M. Germain

MindTouch Deki enables businesses to connect and mash up the growing number of application and data silos that exist across an enterprise. This includes legacy systems, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning Latest News about enterprise resource planning applications, databases and Web 2.0 applications. It fills the collaboration gap across systems for all enterprises, according to the company.

Also of note is Bob’s (MindTouch Platform Engineer) guest blog post at Microsoft’s Port25 that announced the release of a beta Microsoft Installer (MSI) with support for Windows Server 2008, Vista and IIS7. The final release of the two MSIs (one for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Vista and the other for Microsoft Windows Server 2003) will be an enterprise trial version only. Likely with a 15-day trial period.

All in all it seems the majority of the press and analysts understand the nature of MindTouch Deki and our forward trajectory: providing the best collaboration platform ever created. How is this possible? By providing fantastic wiki-like collaboration surface across commonly used enterprise systems, databases and web-services. In short, by allowing (even non-programmers) to adapt MindTouch Deki to their internal processes and technology ecosystems.

Who benefits from MindTouch Deki? The end users: business users and IT professionals. And System Integrators who are finding MindTouch Deki a powerful platform for delivering additional value to their existing customers by connecting existing systems and data sources then adding new collaboration capabilities, dynamic reporting and mashups. These same System Integrators are even able to create new customer acquisition opportunities by adding an “Enterprise 2.0″ to their product portfolios with MindTouch Deki.

Here is a recent demo video that does a good job highlighting the new release.

In this demo I show how users can surface data from disparate applications and databases (MS Access, SQL Server, ADO.NET and others) and mash it up with various services (Windows Live, Yahoo!, Google, and more…). This demo starts by highlighting basic workflow with a Microsoft Access database and the charting package VisiFire. Also demonstrated is how MindTouch Deki can be used to extend and improve CRM (only Salesforce and SugarCRM in this demo–don’t worry Microsoft Dynamics is coming). Finally, the video closes with the aforementioned MindTouch customer that is surfacing data from SQL Server, MS Access, Yardi Financial Software, a legacy Intranet developed in Java, and other Microsoft products and technologies. The customer, Red Mountain Retail Group, is effectively utilizing automatic report creation, dashboards and mashups to save (their claim) 25% of their expenditure on labor that was being consumed by manual report creation. They are also now more able to track project costs and manage personnel. For a more technical understanding of how applications, data and services can be integrated and mashed into reports and dashboards see a recent presentation given by Steve Bjorg at our first DekiCon user conference.

Thanks to everyone for the coverage. I will endeavor to provide link-love more regularly to all those who are kind enough to blog and write about MindTouch.