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 .

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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.

I had a talk with George Dearing from InformationWeek last week. Him being well-versed in Enterprise IT made the conversation lively because he totally understood what MindTouch is delivering to the Enterprise IT infrastructure. George writes:

MindTouch Puts The Enterprise In 2.0 - Content Management Blog - InformationWeek

It’s not often you hear terms like application integration and IT governance from companies building their businesses on Web 2.0 underpinnings such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. So I was somewhat surprised to be smacked in the face with just that from Aaron Fulkerson, the tech-talking co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a company that wants to be the “tissue” that helps enterprises connect all those disparate systems.

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My first thought was why isn’t everybody doing this stuff? For starters, it’s because creating scalable Web architectures isn’t for the faint of heart. Fulkerson says the founders’ backgrounds in distributed systems helps it deliver on the promise of easy-to-use interfaces and IT-friendly integration.

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So how is MindTouch making friends with both business and IT? For IT, the pitch is simple; make their lives easier by empowering them to add governance not just over the wiki, but over all of their applications. In that sense, Deki Wiki, says Fulkerson, becomes not only an integration layer but a common user interface across different applications. The heavy emphasis on integration is a calculated move by MindTouch, one it knows will not only pique the interest of CTOs across the land, but put it head-to-head with middleware heavyweights such as BEA Systems and IBM.

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The other side of the social enterprise equation involves the user experience. I asked Fulkerson how MindTouch manages to appease business users.

“We’re allowing customers to add this 2.0 social layer to existing enterprise applications. That adds a tremendous amount of value to the organization because users can interact with applications much easier through common interfaces and processes,” he said.

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. Their doing this with dynamic report templates, situational applications and by providing alternative interfaces to a variety of legacy systems that are inherently difficult to use. In these cases the wiki is more of a canvas to a distributed application platform or a kind of enterprise connective tissue. MindTouch users are realizing much more value from their existing systems and human resources. The IT department is facilitating this while maintaining unprecedented governance. A smaller percentage of users are developing entirely new applications on MindTouch Deki Wiki. These folks are using the software as an alternative to BEA Weblogic. I’ll write about this at another time.

In reference to how our customers are using MindTouch Deki Wiki as enterprise glue, George mused:

“This is exactly what we were trying to do in the Enterprise IT infrastructure back in 1997–centralize and integrate. This is great!”

He’s absolutely correct. Except we’ve taken a decidedly different approach that delivers far more benefits to the IT department at a much lower price point. Specifically, previous enterprise integration products were very much focused on centralizing systems. These were almost entirely closed systems and they’ve all taken a systems view. MindTouch is an open platform, not to be confused with insecure–this means adhering to open standards, takes a distributed approach and allows users to create a very people-centric view of systems and data. MindTouch, rather than centralizing and thereby creating vendor lock-in as well as additional burden on the IT dept, allows an IT professional to connect systems and allow users to be able to organize systems and data to suit their needs and their processes. And because it’s so easy to create situational apps and reports these can be iterated on and adapted as needs change. MindTouch is allowing IT professionals to provide governance over their existing enterprise systems, databases, and Web 2.0 applications while allowing users to get at the data they need in the way that suits them best.

Why aren’t other vendors taking the same approach as MindTouch? What we’ve engineered is really hard. Also, we saw the need and trends coalescing early on and our backgrounds in distributed systems research made use well positioned to engineer a solution. For more information read the MindTouch Technology page.