New eBook “Open Minded CEOs”, an Expose of Open Source Revolutionaries

October 18th, 2012 | | Awards and Press, Community News

In a compelling new eBook, Open Minded CEOs: A collection of essays and interviews from opensource.com, we learn that working the open source way isn’t always easy and the reward of fanning idea sparks into successful product bonfires takes more than effort, it takes passion and determination. CEOs that make every effort daily to implement open source philosophies in their companies face some central and challenging questions: How can we bring people together to do great things? What motivates them? How can we coordinate them when they unite? How does working the open source way allow us to anticipate the future and adapt to thrive in it? And what counts as success?

This eBook features CEOs from some of today’s most fascinating companies, including our own Aaron Fulkerson who …”has emerged as a true open source leader. Aside from being a much sought-after public speaker and prolific blogger, he has grown and managed MindTouch to a company of more than 50 that was voted one of the best places to work in San Diego, CA .”

Aaron is featured in a section titled MindTouch CEO on open standards, culture, and working at Microsoft, originally published in May 2010. Since then MindTouch has grown into a global company with hundreds of employees serving thousands of companies large and small alike around the world. From its open source beginnings MindTouch has evolved stridently from an enterprise collaboration leader to a company that is reinventing and reinvigorating product help with web, social and mobile innovations that dramatically improves the customer experience and provides business with fresh key benefits and ROI from their product help and documentation investment.

Click here to receive a free copy of Open Minded CEOs: A collection of essays and interviews from opensource.com

5 Things You Need to Know to Answer 1 Question: What Makes Your Company Great?

August 28th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy
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Every once in a while, I sit back, push away from my desk and look around at all the amazing things that are happening at MindTouch, and how much we’ve grown over the past few years. It’s true, we have a really great product…but there’s more to it than that, and I thought I’d share what we’ve learned as we’ve grown from a small open-source start-up to a company trusted by thousands of other companies, large and small, around the world:

1) Understand why your buyers or users love working with you

At MindTouch we use our very own customer experience features to gather customer feedback at the conclusion of each and every customer project as well as at key milestones in all parts of an on-going relationship.

Last week our CEO, Aaron Fulkerson sat down with the information from our own feedback system from over the last year or so, to evaluate the remarks pertaining to precisely what customers really love about working with MindTouch. He rather quickly uncovered two things that clients simply love about us – we are always actively thinking about them (we have knowledge of their enterprise, are subject matter experts, supply actionable insights, as well as anticipate likely problem areas) and furthermore we really care (we are exceptionally quick to respond, very flexible and easy to work with, go the extra mile, and place a lot of emphasis on superior quality).

If you happen to be gathering feedback data from your customers, you should carry out the same exercise to expose the fundamentals of what makes you exceptional to the customers who always keep coming back.

2) Recognize who your very best customers are

When businesses begin accumulating user feedback data, the impulse is almost always to focus attention on fixing the negative feedback. Even though this is very important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of focusing on your very best customers. I describe these folks as our Passionate Promoters. For any company, Passionate Promoters are essential to company stability and growth. They really want to work with you, they advocate for your product to colleagues and across social networks, and they cheerfully spend their dollars with you. Always keep these people completely satisfied, and when a problem crops up, deal with it fast.

3) Know who your very best staff members are

Behind each and every loyal customer are extraordinary employees or, as I refer to them, Brand Ambassadors. Have you figured out which of all of your employees are nurturing your best clients? Furthermore, are have you been actively learning from them to help you coach and strengthen the skill-sets of your other employees?

4) Uncover what your very best customers want more of

We find among MindTouch users in every sector that fully engaged customers actually want to spend considerably more money with a business that engages with them proactively. The MindTouch TCS solution incorporates an environment for users to recommend if there is anything  more they would wish for, like a feature or improvement. Often times customers aren’t familiar with all of the products and services you sell and incorporating feedback tools will give you an opportunity for you to educate and inform your customers about your total suite of products or services as well as an environment to enable them to share with you a need you may possibly not have previously unearthed. One of our customers recently unveiled a $100,000 opportunity by simply using the customer feedback tools of their MindTouch powered product documentation.

5) Monitor the engines of your success

When evaluating customer engagement it is often possible to obsess over the “Mega Metrics” the big numbers that seem to indicate organizational success. However to do so could very well detract from being focused on the unique elements you can personally identify as present or not present in your company and that either drive engagement for your customers or otherwise kill opportunities.

Creating truly engaging customer experiences doesn’t require that your organization gets lopsided but it does require an investment in creating exceptional experiences and gaining the ability to tune into your customers’ sense of product and support fulfillment. Doing so means that you, your employees, your clients, and your prospects will know exactly what it is that makes your company great.

MindTouch Announces Contextual Help for Web Apps to Improve Product Support, Fuel Marketing and Sales

July 19th, 2011 | | Press Release
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“F1 for Web Applications” Puts Contextually Relevant Help Content Within Reach, Helps Users Avoid the Noise and Confusion of Forums

San Diego, CA, July 19, 2011 — MindTouch, the leader in exceptional and engaging product help experiences, today announced the availability of MindTouch Contextual Help – a new capability of MindTouch TCS that allows application vendors to instantly add a contextual help system to their Web apps. This “F1-style” addition creates a rich social help experience for end users, removes the need for expensive engineering resources in development and maintenance, and provides product managers and marketers with a wealth of data and insights about the needs and challenges of their end users and prospective buyers.

Web applications have matured and become increasingly complex, but help systems have not kept pace. Even today’s most popular Web applications like Google Apps or Salesforce.com make it difficult for users to learn because they require context switching across many help and documentation silos, or worse…the widely deployed, yet rudderless forums that masquerade as help sites for users today.

With this announcement, MindTouch is revolutionizing in-product help for the cloud-computing era. Help content doesn’t have to live in PDF’s and paper-based manuals published to the Web – MindTouch is the best way to quickly implement a proven and effective help system right within your apps. 

“It’s astounding to think that in-product help has been as neglected as it has been for the past decade,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch. “MindTouch, with our new F1 feature, gives businesses the ability to sophisticated and intelligent help systems previously only available for million dollar price tags. We’re giving our customers a way to deliver great context sensitive help as well as a means of providing marketing and product teams with insights to their customers. This is about simultaneously meeting the needs of customers while giving marketing departments, product teams and support departments new tools for mining intelligence.”

While MindTouch creates exceptional help experiences for Web app end-users, it also has several features and benefits for marketers and product managers. Product managers love MindTouch Contextual Help because it gives them critical insights into the way that customers use their product, features that cause confusion, or which new features should be a top priority. Also, engineering teams are able to utilize more resources in product development rather than the development and maintenance of help systems. Now technical writers can operate more autonomously without requiring expensive engineering resources. 

Marketers love the MindTouch Contextual Help capability because it lets them better understand the needs of their customers, and identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling additional products and services. The knowledge base content provides a rich source of leads and tremendous benefits to SEO, and marketers can use those robust support capabilities as a differentiator over competitors.

“SugarCRM is a mission-critical tool for our customers to grow their own businesses – and our help experience has to be exceptional to meet their needs.” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM. “We are looking to this truly innovative solution from MindTouch to help us meet those needs.”

MindTouch Contextual Help for your Web Applications provides:

  • Out-of-the-box help system
  • Lowered dependency on engineering resources
  • Increased customer engagement
  • Single source sales and marketing automation rules
  • A way to reduce support costs by bringing your self-serve support docs straight to your users, right within your app
  • Easy setup and deployment in your apps
  • Lower support, happier customers

Pricing and Availability 

MindTouch Contextual Help is available today as part of the MindTouch TCS Social Knowledge Base, which startes at approximately $2,000. For more information please visit http://mindtouch.com/add-ons/contextual_help.

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About MindTouch

An open-source collaboration leader since 2005, MindTouch provides the world’s most respected social knowledge base, with a focus on product support, customer service, and technical documentation.

Providing scalable, agile, and extensible social software, MindTouch offers businesses a platform from which to create dynamic and fully-integrated content communities. Personalized information at the point of each customer interaction increases satisfaction and retention, and it also creates new marketing and sales opportunities, whether that’s in a site or service, over email, on a support call, or inside a forum or app.

Great companies like Novell, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Mozilla, HTC, Viacom, Intuit, Microsoft, Panasonic and EMC use MindTouch for strategic social knowledge, and millions interact with the software every day.

Learn more at http://www.mindtouch.com.

MindTouch and Dachis Group Announce MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group

November 5th, 2010 | | Press Release
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New Turn-key Social Intranet Replaces Disparate Online Collaboration Tools with Unified, Engaging Solution

San Diego, CA, November 5, 2010 — MindTouch, the company that transforms great work into strategic content, today announced the immediate availability of MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group. This jointly developed solution is an enterprise-ready, turn-key intranet solution that replaces online collaboration silos with a purpose-built solution that brings teams, applications and systems together to help your organizations accomplish more. 

The days of stagnant intranets, under-utilized collaboration platforms and outdated information are over. This solution allows your users to easily connect your software, systems and people to create a vibrant, real-time information fabric – an intranet your users will adopt and utilize.

“We are thrilled to begin joint delivery of the most extensible and effective social intranet on the market,” said Aaron Fulkerson, Founder and CEO of MindTouch. “True collaboration is accomplished in the context of the applications, data and people you work with – it’s an information fabric that weaves throughout your business. This solution is the first social intranet to bake that holistic and extensible approach into the product itself, and is based on a proven, real-world implementation at Dachis Group.”

The MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group was developed based on Dachis Group’s implementation of the MindTouch platform and the two firms related partnership. MindTouch and Dachis Group have since teamed up to bring this product to market and deliver a turn-key solution that has been conceived of, developed and fine-tuned in a real-world social business environment.

“We are excited to be partnering with MindTouch as they deliver this product,” said Jeff Dachis, founder and CEO of Dachis Group. “This innovative solution was influenced by our own adoption and use of the MindTouch platform and Dachis Group’s Social Business Design thinking along with the extensive workforce collaboration expertise at MindTouch to provide a turn-key solution that delivers immediate and measurable business value.”

Product Details

  • MindTouch Social Intranet
    • Collaborative Web-Based AuthoringEnable users to share ideas, updates and documents within an online authoring and editing experience, further accelerating adoption
    • Enterprise Dashboards (Business Intelligence)Enterprise dashboards (with MindTouch Charts) deliver business intelligence, previously unheard of at this price point. Combine information from disparate systems to create actionable datasets for teams that might not have always had such access to data
    • Social User ProfilesRegardless of size, an organization can now find their subject matter experts for specific projects or initiatives.
    • Pre-built Connections to LDAP/Active Directory Authentication and Policy EnginesUse your existing network directories to grant users access
    • BrandingGet your social intranet up and running with the same look and feel as your other corporate properties
  • Workforce by Dachis Group
    • Workforce ProjectsWorkforce Projects keeps projects and initiatives on-time and on-track, managing status, timelines and related documents.
    • Workforce Issue ManagementWorkforce Issue Management is a great solution for any help desk or engineering team that needs to manage open issues, such as help desk tickets, issue tracking or feature requests.
    • Workforce CommentsWorkforce Comments lets coworkers connect, regardless of their physical location. With Workforce Comments you can start a conversation, follow a particular project or issue and collaborate in real time with your team members.

MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group is available today. Visit MindTouch Social Intranet for more details.

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About Dachis Group

Dachis Group is the world’s leading Social Business consultancy.

Social Business Design is connecting with your customers + your workforce + your enterprise to create powerful business value.

Through its three main Social Business practice areas, Social Business Strategy, Social Business Engagement, and Social Business Intelligence, Dachis Group helps large organizations become more connected and engaged with their constituents. The company has developed a framework for Social Business Design by addressing organizational transformation across business systems, process, and culture.

Dachis Group serves over 15% of the Fortune 500 companies, including: American Express, AOL, AT&T, Bud Light, Calvin Klein, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Cisco, Citibank, The Coca-Cola Company, COVERGIRL, DeVry, Dodge, Doritos, Estee Lauder, HBO, HP, IBM, Intel, JetBlue, Lexus, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Motorola, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Sprint and Yum! Brands.

Dachis Group was founded in 2008, by Jeffrey Dachis. The company offers services around the globe with offices in eight cities in five countries, employing over 120 professionals. Dachis Group is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; St. Louis, Missouri; London, England; Sydney, Australia; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Madrid, Spain.

Dachis Group operates as: Dachis Group; Headshift, part of the Dachis Group; Stuzo, part of the Dachis Group; XPLANE, part of the Dachis Group and The 2.0 Adoption Council, part of the Dachis Group.

The company’s strategy is backed by a financial commitment from Austin Ventures to build and grow organically and through acquisitions.

Resources and Contact Details

MindTouch Unleashes the Power of Big Data with Newest Release

April 26th, 2010 | | Press Release

Newest version of industry’s leading collaboration platform delivers up to 12x performance improvement for ‘data-heavy’ sites

SAN DIEGO, April 26, 2010 — MindTouch, the industry’s leading open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today announced the availability of the newest version of the MindTouch Collaboration Platform, the best solution for how teams and companies collaborate today. This newest release enables companies that service large numbers of online users to confidently unleash the power of rich media, data transfer and rapid application development to their collaboration experience.

As customers have been successful in developing their own micro-apps on top of the MindTouch platform, this performance boost not only improves the speed of native applications, but integrates a new level of speed in customer and partner applications.

“MindTouch’s new feature set will be a welcome addition to maintaining our online presence”, said Miguel de Icaza, Vice President, Developer Platform at Novell. “We’re very pleased with MindTouch as a platform for all of our new content sites, particularly as we continue to see exponential data increases.”

“Performance is critical to the success of our customers, many of whom service millions of users each day,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch. “As these sites continue to grow in size and complexity, this performance boost will enable them to breathe new life into legacy apps, and seamlessly manage large amounts of data and applications, while continuing to adopt new users.”

The term “Big Data” is continuing to gain traction within the IT and enterprise 2.0 communities. “Big Data” is a particularly relevant concept to MindTouch customers managing volumes upon volumes of digital media files and/or millions of site visitors, as well as those whose applications rapidly change to meet market needs.

MindTouch has leveraged its extensible and robust WOA/REST architecture to seamlessly employ the new performance boost through an efficient code library edition, obviating the need for customers to have to re-install a new product. The release is being made available as a simple upgrade to existing and new commercial customers of the MindTouch platform.

Download your copy of MindTouch Enterprise today.

MindTouch is the industry’s leading provider of enterprise collaboration solutions in a market that continues to grow rapidly as more companies are operating under “lite” IT budgets for the foreseeable future. Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is predicted by Forrester to grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013.

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MindTouch and Levementum Announce Joint Solution Defining Collaborative CRM

April 13th, 2010 | | Press Release

Leading Open Source Collaborative Solution Now Available with the Leading Open Source CRM Solution, SugarCRM, and Delivered by the Leading Open Source Systems Integrator, Levementum

SAN DIEGO, April 13, 2010 — MindTouch, the industry’s leading open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today announced its partnership with Levementum, the industry leading open source systems integration firm, enabling sales collaboration solutions that redefine collaborative CRM, through MindTouch’s availability as an integration with SugarCRM. MindTouch announces this collaboration during the week of SugarCon 2010 in San Francisco, where Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch CEO, will be speaking on Tuesday, April 13, 11:45-12:30 in a session entitled, “Collaborative CRM Is the Center of the Enterprise 2.0 Universe.”

This new integration with SugarCRM and delivered by Levementum, allows teams to create — automatically and directly from the SugarCRM opportunity — new sales opportunity collaboration pages; create configurable templates for sales opportunities; develop standardized materials for key sales deliverables such as contracts and memorandums; and maintain the height of version control. The integration further provides automatic access to internal team members, partners, and customers. As such, SugarCRM, MindTouch and Levementum are allowing sales team easier paths to sealing deals, better forecasting of business growth, and an improved view into the opportunities that will most benefit their overall business.

“MindTouch has the smartest available collaboration platform for integration with SugarCRM — where the customer’s needs and requirements can be collected, stored and translated into specifications defining the sale and where all key players can be brought together around the negotiation leading to sale,” said Geoffrey Mobisson, Managing Director of Technology and Partnerships. “There’s also no replacement for the standardization of contractual documents that comes with use of a system as robust as MindTouch.”

“The art of sales is a collaborative process involving sales, sales operations, the customer and often third parties, with as much as 75 percent of sales process cycle time spent on collaborative activities,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch. “We make that a more smooth and predictable process with the SugarCRM integration, providing standardization of sales deliverables where such benefit has been largely lacking. Levementum has been invaluable in bringing this new offering to fruition.”

MindTouch is the industry’s leading provider of enterprise collaboration solutions in a market that continues to grow rapidly as more companies are operating under “lite” IT budgets for the foreseeable future. Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is predicted by Forrester to grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013.

About Levementum

Levementum is a leading professional services firm focused on delivering world-class implementations of Open Source Enterprise Software, including CRM, ERP and e*Commerce solutions. Levementum’s Open Source Practice shows companies how to leverage open source information technology and innovate. As an implementation partner and system integrator of SugarCRM, MindTouch, Magento, Compiere and Pentaho, Levementum has led dozens of change management and technology implementations over the company’s lifetime, and it’s “PILLAR” implementation methodology enables rapid deployment and helps customers maximize the value of their investment through process consulting, project leadership, adoption and training programs, application development, integration and business intelligence.

For further information about our services, please visit our website: http://www.levementum.com or contact us directly at +1 (480) 320-2520.

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About SugarCRM

SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software. Over 6,000 customers and more than half a million users rely on SugarCRM to execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers and create custom business applications. Leading publications such as CRM Magazine, InfoWorld and eWeek praise SugarCRM for its ease-of-use, flexibility and open design. SugarCRM runs on the leading cloud computing platforms, including Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Sugar On-Demand and Private Clouds, offering customers unparalleled choice and control of their data and deployments.

For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.

Sign Up for First Demo of MindTouch 2009 with Intro by CEO, Aaron Fulkerson

April 14th, 2009 | | Webinar

messagebus_mindtouch20091Tomorrow’s webinar is really unique in that we’ll be demo-ing for the first time publicly MindTouch 2009 and MindTouch CEO and Co-Founder, Aaron Fulkerson, will be making a 15 minute introduction to the webinar. This is a webinar you simply cannot miss. Make sure to SIGN UP and mark your calendars for the webinar and witness firsthand the powerful new feature set of MindTouch 2009 and what it can do for you and your organization.

Along with a host of powerful features for building new apps, MindTouch 2009 provides users with a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities. With the new bi-directional messaging bus users are now able to setup and receive change notifications when changes are made within MindTouch 2009 or to the many applications that users plug into MindTouch 2009, such as enterprise systems, databases, office productivity applications, Web services and more.

RSVP for the Webinar today!

MindTouch Welcomes Microsoft’s Expanded Transparency and Open Interoperability

February 22nd, 2008 | | Press Release

MindTouch Welcomes Microsoft’s Expanded Transparency and Open Interoperability

San Diego, Calif., Feb. 22, 2008 -  MindTouch, the open source wiki platform company and developer of MindTouch Deki, welcomed Microsoft’s newly announced strategy to promote interoperability by increasing the openness of its products to outside developers. As a leader in the open source .Net community, MindTouch believes this move by Microsoft will encourage innovation in software development.

“This announcement is positive and is clearly part of a continued effort by Microsoft to open up to the large community of open source developers,” observed Aaron Fulkerson, Founder and CEO of MindTouch. “In the past there has been a cloud over open source projects that were building on and extending the Microsoft platform because of the potential for litigation. This concern has been repeated by leading analysts such as Gartner and others. As a result there was a dampening effect on innovation that has just been lessened.”

MindTouch Deki is a free open source wiki and application platform for authoring, aggregating, organizing, and sharing content. The easy-to-use solution makes it simple for non-technical users to create web pages and instantly collaborate on text, files, and emails. Unlike other wikis, MindTouch Deki is a customizable, scalable platform that enables users to create custom collaborative solutions and connect wikis to existing infrastructure – including mashup systems, databases, external services, and Web 2.0 applications.

Fulkerson continued, “With this announcement, Microsoft is showing evidence of accepting the fact that innovation on their platform is increasingly coming from open source ISVs such as MindTouch.”

MindTouch Deki is the world’s most popular enterprise wiki, with more than 100,000 installations. The software, released under GPL and LGPL, is free for download and use without restrictions. MindTouch backs MindTouch Deki with professional support for businesses and communities. To learn more, visit http://MindTouch.com.

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