With the roll-out of MindTouch Deki “Jay Cooke” v 8.05.2 we introduced MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition. MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition is production ready open source software and our only platform that is stress-tested, certified and supported. MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition includes services tailored to saving organizations time and money by helping getting projects completed securely and quickly. MindTouch is always there when you need support.

What you get with the Enterprise Edition

• 100% Open Source with Commercial Support
• Stress Tested
• Supported Builds
• Certified Scalability
• MindTouch QA Certified with Most Complete Test Coverage

When you upgrade to “Jay Cooke” v. 8.05.02 you will notice at the bottom on your wiki pages it reads, “Powered by MindTouch Deki Community Edition v.8.05.2″. You may wonder what the difference is between the two versions, all that information is available on our web site. To activate your Enterprise Edition you need to obtain an Enterprise ID. If you are a current customer you may do so by following the instructions below or contacting your sales representative. This key is provided at no cost to our existing customers but, will be required upon contacting MindTouch for future support requests.

Follow these steps in order to activate your MindTouch Enterprise Edition:

1. Upgrade your MindTouch Deki install to 8.05.2 by following the upgrade steps.
2. Once upgraded you will go to the Control Panel and click on MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition
3. On this screen you will see an API Key, copy this and send it to support@mindtouch.com
4. A short time later an Enterprise ID will be sent back to you via email.  You will upgrade your edition by putting the supplied ID into the form and clicking “Upgrade”.
5. Once you click upgrade you will receive conformation that the upgrade has been successful!
6. Your Enterprise ID will be required when you contact MindTouch for support.

The Enterprise ID can always be referenced by going to the MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition in the Control Panel. Once you have completed this process you are on MindTouch Deki Enterprise going forward.

If you have any questions about this upgrade or would like to become a MindTouch Deki Enterprise customer, contact sales or your support agent.

Since the 8.05 Jay Cooke VM release, Debian has announced several security updates which affect the Deki Wiki VM. Because reading the debian-security-announce mailing list probably isn’t your idea of fun (though I think it is), we’ve started tracking the Deki Wiki specific updates on the DekiWiki VM Security Updates page.

One of the latest vulnerabilities is particularly annoying. According to DSA-1576-1:

The recently announced vulnerability in Debian’s openssl package (DSA-1571-1, CVE-2008-0166) indirectly affects OpenSSH. As a result, all user and host keys generated using broken versions of the openssl package must be considered untrustworthy, even after the openssl update has been applied.

To apply the security fix for openssl and openssh you’ll need run the following commands (as root)

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client

This will regenerate a secure host key for you. The next time you log in via SSH you will most likely receive the following error message:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
52:8e:93:04:64:a5:7e:ac:c8:2c:2b:9a:96:ad:66:32.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:58
RSA host key for 192.168.1.215 has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

For most people this is simply an annoyance. However, if you have any automated processes that use the old ssh keys to log in, you will need to update your keys. The DSA has a lot of good info, and instructions on how to use ssh-vulnkey too identify weak keys so I highly recommend giving it a good read.

As always, if you have any questions please drop by the forums or IRC!

What’s going on skinners? Yeah, I’m talking to you. I know you’ve been working hard, trying to spice up your Deki Wiki. Well, I have some great news for you. Every Jay Cooke release comes bundled with CSS variables support!

Now you can easily update your CSS styles by changing just a few lines of code. The feature has been modeled after this unapproved spec, but is completely browser compliant since it’s preprocessed by the server. For more details about how to use CSS variables in your skin, please visit the spec page I’ve put together.

Stay tuned for more thrilling skinning updates soon!

To add onto all the other cool stuff in Deki Wiki v8.05, I also wanted to mention that we now have a PHP extension for DekiWiki. Which means that you can now have your own PHP server communicate with DekiWiki via DekiScript. For more details on how to set it up, you can refer to the tutorial Deki Extensions for PHP.

In order to allow the above extension to work, we’ve also made it so that anyone can communicate with DekiScript via XML-RPC. So, even if you don’t have a PHP server, you can still take advantage of the fact that DekiWiki will understand requests to it in standard XML-RPC format.

And finally, as icing on top of all this, we also have the XML return type enabled for the PHP extension (even though that type does not exist in XML-RPC), this means that you can also return things inside of HTML formatted tags and DekiScript will integrate your XML code into your DekiWiki page. For more information on how to build out HTML that can be embedded into your wiki page, you can refer to Steve’s page on this: HTML Page Composition.

By now our loyal readers are likely sick of hearing me talk about the latest release of Deki Wiki :-), but I’m obliged to thank all the pubs and blogs that covered our announcement and to return some link-love. The response is nothing short of remarkable. In no particular order, here it goes:

The must read post of all the coverage, and there was a lot of quality coverage, is Dr. Dobbs. I say this only because it’s the most technical post and most of our readers are technical. I summarize here, but I encourage you to read the entire post:

Dr. Dobb’s | Web Oriented Architectures…and why Mozilla adopted the Deki Wiki | May 7, 2008

Steve Bjorg: Web-Oriented Architecture is an alternative to Service-Oriented Architecture. WOA is fundamentally about “open” systems that communicate over “open” and established protocols and formats. In WOA, HTTP takes center-stage as the communication protocol between applications and web-services. Beyond that, the exchange format is also web-centric and is often XHTML, RSS, RDF, or other such formats. In WOA, web-services embrace the same technological design principles that web-applications have been following for years: communication between services is stateless, formats are open and extensible, and data exchanges are cacheable. All desirable properties for creating large scale, ad-hoc networks of connected, heterogenous web-services.

…

Mike Shaver: … We were looking for a system that would give us the tools to combine and “remix” those data sources creatively, and Deki Wiki is designed with exactly that goal in mind.

…

Because Deki Wiki is designed as a distributed application, it will be quite straightforward for us to integrate content and data from other parts of our world, without creating a maintenance nightmare by hacking on the core code or trying to program to underpowered APIs. More than any other Wiki system we looked at, Deki Wiki feels designed to be extended as a platform for web applications and we’re really looking forward to having that power available to our community.

Mike Shaver: Mozilla is a large project, and our Developer Center alone has hundreds of editors collaborating in more than a dozen languages to create tens of thousands of pages of content. With the Jay Cooke release of Deki Wiki, we have more powerful localization tools than ever before, and great support for working with many different types of web content at our significant scale.

You can get started quickly with the VM image that’s provided by Mindtouch, and whipping up a new extension or integration point is easy enough that even a Chief Evangelist can do it.

Mark Hinkle (Mhinkle), from Socialized Software (and Zenoss), provides analysis and commentary on the latest release:

Microsoft Ex-Pats Developing Open Source Software Outside of Redmond | Socialized Software

Rather than striving to be an all-in-one solution Deki Wiki boasts a robust web services API that allows for integration between other applications. Already Deki Wiki supports authentication via LDAP and Active Directory as well as authentication systems from popular open source content management systems like Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla!.

Today was the release of MIndTouch’s v8.05 (codenamed Jay Cooke) which was largely driven by requirements from the Mozilla Foundation (who will be relaunching their developer community using Deki Wiki). I like to see open source projects use open source software when they get the chance. Sometimes I think we do that because of solidarity among free software developers. However, in the case of Deki Wiki I think that it’s safe to say that Deki Wiki is not only open source, but also best of breed. I have raved about Deki Wiki before but this release has some very cool new features. Through web services you can enable real time chat, embed Google spreadsheets, query databases, and include interactive maps from Google and Windows Live.

Kristen Nicole of Mashable provides coverage of the new release. As always, her assessment is insightful and thorough.

Mozilla’s Tower of Babel, Powered by Mindtouch

Mindtouch’s Deki Wiki is among the most used for enterprise solutions because of its ability to provide highly customized options that meet variant business needs. The result is a consumer-facing page that often bears little resemblance to a wiki at all. And with the never-ending list of included programs, plug-ins and options, the combinations available for clients can pretty much offer whatever it is you need.

Mozilla agrees, and has selected Mindtouch to power its new Developer Community. As a result of the partnership between Mindtouch and Mozilla, a new version of the Deki Wiki has been released, to meet Mozilla’s demands. That’s good for you, because there are some very handy features involved in this latest version, entitled the Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” v8.05.

The most notable new feature, in my opinion, is the new polygot capability, which provides support for all the major languages out there. It’s a virtual tower of Babel, where every user can experience the wiki in its entirety, in their native language. The language is set in user preferences, and content, including searched content, is served up accordingly.

The ever vigilant and intelligent Marshall Kirkpatrick jumps in with his assessment of our latest innovations:

MindTouch Goes Polyglot, Gets Nod From Mozilla - ReadWriteWeb

MindTouch also announced that Deki Wiki has been chosen as the new framework to power the Mozilla Developer Community site, some great validation for a company that often seems to stand so far out on the bleeding edge that it could make potential users feel uneasy.

Ordinarily we wouldn’t write here about new versions of software, but this internationalization seems like a great fit for our international audience. MindTouch is far more than just a wiki, it’s a CMS with extensive application and mashup support. We wrote in January, for example, about the company’s integration with one of our favorite services, Dapper. Deki Wiki was born as a Mediawiki fork, but those roots are barely recognizable anymore under several years of powerful innovation.

Also covering the announcement is VentureBeat, which has been increasingly expanding it’s coverage with the addition of the seasoned Dean Takahashi from the San Jose Mercury.

MindTouch releases new version of multi-language software » VentureBeat

[With Deki Wiki, users] can integrate multiple languages into a single site, rather than create a separate site for each language. In addition, users visiting the site can search across all languages, with the search results prioritized to that user’s language.

…

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, plans on using Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Development Center, the site where Mozilla manages its community of developers. That’s important for open-source developers such as Mozilla, which has thousands of developers around the world.

CenterNetworks, the up and coming media star also provides brief coverage:

MindTouch DekiWiki Revolutionizes Multilingual Content Management | CenterNetworks

MindTouch is announcing the latest release of their Deki Wiki (8.05) open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform today. I’ve embedded a short video below that reviews the new features. MindTouch is also announcing that their platform has been selected to power the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community.

The major update to Deki Wiki in this new version is a new “polyglot” feature. MindTouch describes polygot, “will allow Mozilla to host all languages as a single site. Now language can be specified by sections and pages thereby automatically adapting the user interface of Deki Wiki to the appropriate language. Also, users may search across all languages and search results are prioritized by the user’s default language.”

Mary Fallon from DEMO.com, a person whom I enjoy talking tech with because her experience always provides a valuable perspective, gives her angle on the recent news:

MindTouch introduces 16 language content management system | DEMO.com

MindTouch, whose open source collaborative software tools let enterprises manage and share information, today released the world’s first polygot content management system that helps software developers create Web applications hosting 16 major spoken languages including English, Japanese, and Russian on a single site.

…

“It’s really bleeding edge,” Fulkerson said. “Now it’s easier than ever to create content, systems automation, dynamic reports, and situational applications.”

Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s chief evangelist, said Mozilla chose MindTouch Deki Wiki after extensive testing of alternatives. “Mozilla believes in the power of the Web to bring people together in wonderfully collaborative ways and MindTouch Deki Wiki’s extensibility and flexible architecture will allow us bring more of this to our developer community,” Shaver said. “The opportunity to easily create our own tools and extensions on top of Deki’s extensive API is sure to inspire some great improvements from our community.”

Shockingly, my blog post made Techmeme! I love Techmeme. I would have thought some of these other great articles/posts would have made Techmeme before my write-up, but hey: yay me!

Also, Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcellerator, an RIA development platform, had some very kind words about MindTouch, an opinion on the significance of the release, and some criticism about our release naming convention.

Introspection by Jeff Haynie

OK, putting aside the silly release naming convention — this is a pretty big announcement for the really cool open source wiki provider, MindTouch.

MindTouch has continued to gain tons of traction and I hear, from one of our common advisors, that they’re getting a lot of downloads on a daily basis. This is a great thing and today’s announcement is important for several reasons.

…

I expected some comments or questions about the new version numbering. We’ve explained it, in part, elsewhere, but allow me to elaborate. We give every release the code name of a state park in Minnesota in descending alphabetical order. This code name is used by the community and the development team to reference the release independent of the release date/number. As of this release we’ve changed the release numbering scheme to one that’s similar to Ubuntu’s. The release number is the release year + . + month; therefore, “Jay Cooke” v8.05 was released May, 2008. The next release is “Killen Woods” and will likely be v8.07.

The coverage of our announcement today is nothing short of remarkable. Thank you all who covered it. We promise to keep innovating and outpacing the competition to give you more great stuff to write about.

Props to future-works for helping to get the word out. Specifically, Miiko Mentz, who is wicked smart, and Allison Bethurem deserve credit for their hard work. I think our most recent social media press release has been especially well received. We’re putting to practice things many others only talk about.

Stay tuned for more news from MindTouch. We’ve got more major announcements on the way.

Mozilla Selects MindTouch as Future Platform for Developer Community

San Diego, Calif., May 7, 2008 - MindTouch today announced the release of MindTouch Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” v8.05––the latest version of its award-winning open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform. The Deki Wiki v8.05 release was driven in part by the requirements of Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community.

MindTouch Deki Wiki v8.05 continues MindTouch’s tradition of bleeding edge technology with innovations in internationalization/localization, search, user management, integrated scripting, automation, mash-ups, user experience and more… Specifically, this new release revolutionizes multilingual content management. Previously, Mozilla managed 16 distinct sites, one for each language. Deki Wiki v8.05 introduces a new polyglot feature that allows Mozilla to host all languages as a single site. Now language can be specified by sections and pages thereby automatically adapting the user interface of Deki Wiki to the appropriate language. Also, users may search across all languages and search results are prioritized by the user’s default language. Lastly, Deki Wiki v8.05 supports OpenSearch, which makes integrating search with other applications nearly automatic.

A short demo of the new multi-lingual polyglot feature.In order to meet the needs of Mozilla’s large and open community, v8.05 also includes new sophisticated tools for IP and user banning, transactional page management, the addition of MediaWiki-like talk pages and provides new functionality that matches and exceeds MediaWiki templates. With the addition of more than 100 new functions added to the DekiScript runtime, a built-in scripting language that’s point-and-click simple, v8.05 continues to lead as the most powerful platform for connecting enterprise systems, web-services, and Web 2.0 applications. Now it’s easier than ever to create content, systems automation, dynamic reports, and situational applications.

In MindTouch’s continuing effort to lead the market with the absolute best user experience this release includes several improvements that, yet again, raises the bar for the industry. Some of these improvements are: an all new file uploader, improved dialogs and on-the-fly content transforms that allow users to specify selections of text for syntax highlighting, SVG, LaTex, various graphs, and more… Moreover, adding new content transforms is a trivial matter for a site admin and takes only minutes.

The new file uploader exemplifies MindTouch’s passion for a quality user experience.
A quick look at content transformations in Deki Wiki.MindTouch Deki Wiki is the only platform that delivers polyglot, content transforms, and allows users to connect systems and easily create data mashups, situational apps, and more… And does so with point-and-click ease.

MindTouch’s Web Oriented Architecture, feature set, and user experience were reasons cited by Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Chief Evangelist, for having selecting Deki Wiki after an extensive evaluation of vendors. “I’m looking forward to deploying Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Developer Center; especially with the enhancements that the Jay Cooke release brings,” said Shaver, “Mozilla believes in the power of the web to bring people together in wonderfully collaborative ways and MindTouch Deki Wiki’s extensibility and flexible architecture will allow us bring more of this to our developer community. The opportunity to easily create our own tools and extensions on top of Deki’s extensive API is sure to inspire some great improvements from our community.”

About MindTouch

MindTouch, recognized the world over for innovation beyond open source wiki collaboration and content management, is delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform. MindTouch Deki Wiki, built with a Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), enables users to connect teams, enterprise systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications with IT governance. Users easily access and organize data and systems efficiently to achieve their business objectives.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is deployed by Fortune 500 companies, major media, research/education institutions, government agencies, and online businesses worldwide. Customers include Microsoft, Fujitsu, Siemens, Gannett, FedEx, U.S. Army, DoD, and others. MindTouch is committed to delivering next generation solutions to people, businesses and governments. For more information about our company, people and innovations, visit http://mindtouch.com .

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.