As you all know, we sent out a customer survey a few weeks back and have been floored by the amount of responses we received! It has been a true eye opener to us here at MindTouch to read your experiences, hang ups, compliments, and criticisms on everything from the mindtouch.com website, customer service, sales process, pricing and more. Thank you all for sending us your feedback - we will wholeheartedly take everything you suggested into consideration and use the information to truly make MindTouch a better experience and company for all! Thank you!

To that note, I want to announce our WINNERS of the G1 Phone Giveaway! From the random selection I’m proud to announce that Alexandra Runswick, Jim Lilkendey, and Patrick Burrell are the winners and proud owners of a NEW G1 phone! Congratulations guys!

Here’s what our G1 Phone winners had to say:

Patrick Burrell
Access Business Group

“I just discovered MindTouch about 2 months ago. One of my first thoughts was, ‘Why haven’t I been using this for the past 2 years?’ The wiki functionality is great, but it’s the WOA & services architecture under the hood I’m most excited about. I’m eager to see what we’re able to create with this platform.

“And the G1 phone? I’ve been following the Android platform since it was announced but haven’t actually tried it. Problem solved! Many thanks to the folks at MindTouch for another geek toy to play with!”

Jim Lilkendey
Apogee Coaching

“I have used MindTouch, both stand-alone and hosted, and I think it is a great wiki portal solution for businesses — I am definitely a fan.  Winning a G1 phone in their latest giveaway wasn’t too bad either.”

Alexandra Runswick
Unlock Democracy

“I’m really excited to have won the phone - I’ve never won anything before and can’t wait to explore it.  Having said that, it wasn’t the phone that made me take part in the survey.  I’ve only just started using MindTouch and wanted to help develop what is already a really useful product.”

Thanks for the kind words, guys and again CONGRATS to all of our winners and thank you to all who participated in the MindTouch survey! We appreciate all of the honest, thoughtful feedback and look forward to meeting more of your wiki portal solution needs in the future.

The Extension I’m focusing on this week is Google Search. Google Search allows you to display results of a keyword search within a MindTouch Deki page broken down into the following categories: Web, Local, Image, Video, News, Blog, and Book.

To get started install the Google extension.

Once that is installed we can invoke the extension through the MindTouch Deki Extension dialog. To do this click Edit on the page that you want the extension to be on and then click the Extension Icon in the editor that looks like this:

This will open up the Extension Dialog where you can scroll down and select Google as an option and then select google.search.

Now you can specify the search term(s) that you want to search for on Google along with specifying if you want to only return a certain set of results like Blogs, Books, News. You can select if you want the result to be tabbed and if you want to publish or subscribe to any channels.

For this example we are going to search for MindTouch and keep the defaults for options. Once you type in mindtouch you can click Insert Extension and the following syntax will be shown on the page:

{{ google.Search{search: "mindtouch"} }}

This will return the following:

Adding google.search to your Deki pages will add contextual relevance search results for the content and add more interactivity for the visitors. The method of inserting the google.search extension using the extension dialog is available for all extensions in MindTouch and is an easy way for your users to create dynamic pages.

If you have any questions about this extension please leave a comment or contact us.

This week I’m going to focus on a lesser known set of built in Meta Tag extensions for MindTouch Deki. The Meta Tag extensions allow you to add information into the header of MindTouch Deki like keywords, description, author information, and more. I’m going to focus on a couple of common use cases that Meta Tags are beneficial for:

In support I’m often asked the following question: “I want to add my site to Google Webmaster Tools but they need me to verify that I own the site.” Google gives two options to do this 1) upload an html file into the root directory or 2) add a custom Meta Tag to the site header. Uploading an html file or adding a keyword typically requires FTP or Shell access. With MindTouch Deki we simplify it by allowing you to add custom Meta tag extensions through the WYSIWYG Editor.

In the case of adding a Meta Tag so that you can have ownership of a site you would do the following:

1. Edit your MindTouch Deki HomePage and click on the Cog icon to open the Extension dialog
2. Click on Built in Functions and scroll down to meta.custom
3. The name is the meta name that Google includes, something like verify-v1
4. The content would be the long alpha numeric string from the Google code
5. Insert it and save the page, then go back to Google and verify

The actual extension will look something like this (content is skewed):

{{ meta.custom{name: "verify-v1", content: "fdshjfhdsjkhfjkdshjkfdsafkdshakfhdksa543245"} }}

Another good use for the Meta Tags is to add keywords and descriptions for your MindTouch Deki pages. This helps with SEO of your MindTouch Deki site. You can do so by going into the Extension dialog again through the editor and selecting meta.keywords or meta.description under the Built In category. This can be done on a per page basis.

Here is an example of a meta keyword and description DekiScript:

{{ meta.keywords{content: "blog, testing"} }}
{{ meta.description{content: "This is a test page about meta tags"} }}

This functionality is currently available in all MindTouch Deki downloads Release 1.9.1 and higher and will be available in Wik.is after the next upgrade which will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

To read more about the supported Meta extensions in MindTouch Deki check out the Meta Functions specs.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us: http://wiki.mindtouch.com/support

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!

About a week ago I read an article written by Marshal Kirkpatrick called How to build an RSS and Blog News Site for your project. In short, Marshall basically outlined how he had built an RSS-based microsite for the JavaOne conference. The article was great, and although I believed I knew almost everything about refining RSS feeds, I actually learned a thing or two.

Towards the end of the article, Marshall started to dive into the presentation process but confessed that he was not very involved in that portion of the project. At this point, I started thinking about MindTouch Deki Wiki, and how to integrate the filtered and refined RSS feeds using the wiki’s application platform. Deki Wiki is a powerhouse when it comes to aggregating and mashing up content, so it was a fairly reasonable thought. To that end, I figured I would put a couple of demos together to show you how to use Deki Wiki to easily build a similar app. I’ll also demo some of the more advanced stuff like using Dapper to scrape and mashup web apps.

RSS presentation

It’s pretty straight forward. By using the Deki Wiki Extension Dialog () , you can quickly and easily display your RSS feeds as lists, tables, or tabs. Also, since the interface is a wiki, users can easily manipulate the manner in which they want their RSS feeds to display. Create a table, drop your RSS feed in there, maybe add some CSS in the markup view and off you go.

In the screen shot below, you can see that I quickly added two RSS lists into a table and clicked save. Taking Marshall’s advice, I used Google Blogsearch to find and filter my blogsearch. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the time to weed out the duplicates or format the HTML as suggested, but I know that I could have if I had the time. At Google Blogsearch I used the following two search queries:

• (MindTouch and Mozilla) - “Re:”
• (MindTouch or Deki Wiki)

Using Deki Script the RSS feeds look like this, respectively. Keep in mind you don’t have to write Deki Script unless you really want to. You can use the extensions manager to insert and manage all Deki Script.

• {{ feed.list{feed: “http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=(MindTouch+and+Mozilla)+-+%22Re:%22&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss”, max: “30″} }}
• {{ feed.list{feed: “http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=(Deki+Wiki)+-+%22Re:%22&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss”, max: “30″} }}

Using Dapper to Make a Mashup in Deki Wiki

Let’s take this a step further and integrate some other cool applications. I’ll also add some Deki Script to make it as interactive as possible. Let’s start off with two of our most beloved services, Dapper and Yelp. First, using Yelp, I decided to search around for something that interests me. I quickly found the San Diego Nightlife page. I then went to Dapper.net and pieced together my Dapp; I created the values TopTitle, TopDescription, and VenuList. It only took two minutes to create my Dapp, and then I was back over to Deki Wiki. In Deki Wiki, I clicked Edit on my page and using the using the Extension Manager I inserted my Dapp. If you look above the Extension Manger you’ll be able to see a glimpse of the Deki Script that is being created for you.

Again, here is the Deki Script that was entered to retrieve both the TopTitle and TopDescription respectively:

• {{ dapp.html{name: “YelpSanDiegoNightclub”} }}
• {{ dapp.value{name: “YelpSanDiegoNightclub”, xpath: “Top/TopDescription”} }}

Easy, huh? Let’s move along. Next, let’s take the value from our first Dapp (TopTitle) and use it in some other extensions. I’m going to use the TopTile value in a Flickr Slideshow, a Google blog search RSS Feed, and a Google Video search, and then show the list of other ’second rank’ venues. Here is the mashed up Deki Script in the same order:

• {{ flickr.slideshow{tags: dapp.value{name:”YelpSanDiegoNightclub” }, width: “250″, height: “250″} }}
• {{ google.SearchBlogs{search: dapp.value{name:”YelpSanDiegoNightclub” } } }}
• {{ google.searchvideos{search: dapp.value{name:”YelpSanDiegoNightclub” } } }}
• {{ dapp.list{name: “YelpSanDiegoNightclub”, xpath: “VenueList”} }}

As you will see below, I’ve arranged the extensions throughout the page to my liking. I floated the flickr slideshow to the right and then then listed the rest of the extensions throughout the page.

And here’s the final result! The awesome part about this example is that whenever the Yelp community decides another venue is more popular, your entire mashup is updated with the new venue’s info.

The next (more advanced) topic I’ll jump into is parameterized templates, but I’ll save that post for another day. Stay tuned!

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com
@DamienH

I’m really proud to report MindTouch Deki Wiki was selected as the Sourceforge.net Project of the Month for the month of May.

SourceForge.net: Project of the Month, May 2008

What is the software’s intended audience?

The vast majority (more than 90%) of our users deploy behind a firewall. We’ve seen great adoption by IT guys, who want to replace other wikis with inferior user experiences and limited feature sets. They also find it easy to gain traction within their organizations since MindTouch Deki Wiki is the only platform that allows you to connect existing systems. The users are very often business users, but it’s usually the IT guy who is deploying, hooking together systems, and pushing it out to the business guys.

…

What are a couple of notable examples of how people are using your software?

Users of MindTouch Deki Wiki fall into three categories:

• About 50-60% of our users are deploying MindTouch as a general purpose wiki solution for collaboration around text and files. They choose Deki Wiki over other wikis, they tell us, because of the superior user experience and feature set. Maybe because of Deki Wiki’s unique ability to create mashups and situational apps is a factor too. Moreover, sometimes these users cite the fact that they can hook together enterprise systems, web apps and services as a factor in the selection, but these users are not yet to this point. 
• Another 30-40% of your users, and growing, are installing MindTouch Deki Wiki for connecting legacy systems, web apps and web services. This allows users to create alternative interfaces to legacy systems and build new apps from composites (as well as delivering the aforementioned benefits of mashups). This user is almost entirely the enterprise IT guy who is hooking in Web apps, ERP, CRM, Google Apps, etc and allowing the biz users to mash things up to suit their needs, with the added benefit of IT governance.
• The remaining minority of MindTouch Deki Wiki users (5-10%) are doing software development on the platform. We’ve been selected over BEA Weblogic on more than a few occasions to build new apps. When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. When you’re writing new applications in the enterprise it’s most often the case your building on, or integrating with, other enterprise systems, auth systems, etc. MindTouch Deki Wiki’s WOA and service orchestration makes doing this quicker and reusable.

…

What has been your biggest challenge?

MindTouch Deki Wiki often gets lumped into the plain old wiki category. Clearly, we’re not “just another wiki” and what our users do with our software is a clear indication of this. The Web 2.0 Hype machine initially was a real barrier for us. Until recently it’s been a challenge to cut through the noise of less sophisticated products and be heard. Thankfully the strength of our product has allowed us to break through.

…

What are you most proud of?

We’re incredibly proud of the large and active community of users and developers we’ve built around Deki Wiki. It’s an amazing feeling for our developers when they go to a conference, and some random IT guy tells them “Deki Wiki is awesome! I love your product!” I think it’s those personal shout-outs which let us know we’re doing good work that we’re most proud of.

The question above about our biggest challenge really should also give credit to our community of users and devs because it is only through their efforts that MindTouch has spread. So, thanks again gang.

One final note, If you love MindTouch Deki Wiki please consider nominating and voting for MindTouch Deki Wiki in the Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards (requires Sourceforge login or OpenID).

If you subscribe to the MindTouch e-newsletter you received most of this information via email last week. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up today by providing your email in the e-newsletter field at the bottom of the MindTouch.com home page.

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.

Jeremy Thomas of Social Glass kindly covered MindTouch’s recent announcement and commented on my generally recognized disdain for the “2.0″ moniker.

Social Glass » Mindtouch Puts Up Some Impressive Numbers

Mindtouch’s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger.

Jeremy’s correct. I really do not like the “2.0″ moniker; although I was recently tasked with providing technical edits for a book Jeremy and Aaron Newman wrote titled: “Enterprise 2.0 Implementation” for McGraw Hill. The book is fantastic and I’m very honored to have been asked to help with it’s completion. Anyway, the 2.0 assignment to Enterprise software is, of course, an intentional connection to Web 2.0. When are we going to get past this silly name? It’s trendy and well, just silly. The fact is software is increasingly being developed with a mind toward simplicity, ease of use and with a social component. This is true for consumer web applications and enterprise software. I prefer the more, in my opinion, timeless title: “Social Enterprise Software”. Quite frankly I think by 2011 we’ll all be looking back at this “2.0″ obsession as the Members-Only jackets of software.

Anyway, Jeremy provides a short summary of our MindTouch Deki Wiki in the post too.

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Thanks for the write up Jeremy and for calling out my “2.0″ bigotry.