Mindtouch – Glue To The Cloud Apps

Image via CrunchBase

I have been waiting to cover Mindtouch
in my blog even before I started blogging here at Cloud Ave. They
initially attracted my attention because they are an Open Source wiki
provider, and a pretty good one too. Their main focus is on enterprises
but they also offer a SaaS offering in the name of Mindtouch Express
and an On-Demand offering with enterprise level reliability. I have
been using Mindtouch Open Source edition for my personal website and
their SaaS offering for one of the companies in India where I am a
partner. I am going to discuss Mindtouch in this blog both as an user
and, also, an industry observer. Recently, I had a chance to chat with
Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Mindtouch, and I am pretty impressed with the
passion in the company. In this post, I will briefly discuss their
offerings, their approach to solving the problem of collaboration and a
recent news from the company targeted to lure the enterprises living in
the past desktop era.

Founded in 2005, Mindtouch
has evolved from a Wiki built on top of Mediawiki to the current core
built from scratch offering enterprise level features. Apart from their
free Open Source version, they offer both On-Premise and On-Demand
commercial offerings. Their Mindtouch 2009 standard product is a
powerful wiki for internal collaboration and external facing websites.
Their Mindtouch 2009 enterprise edition also includes a collection of
powerful enterprise connectors that turns Mindtouch Wiki into a next
generation collaboration platform offering powerful mashups for
enterprise users. On the hosted applications side, they offer a
slightly stripped down version called Mindtouch Express (both free and
pro targeted towards individuals and non-profits). To meet the needs of
businesses, they also offer Mindtouch On-Demand running Mindtouch 2009
standard or enterprise version with SLA support. This plan is quite
suitable for small to medium businesses requiring reliable access to
Mindtouch wiki. Their Mindtouch Express offering runs on top of a
scalable architecture running on Amazon EC2. I am not really sure about
it but I think that their On-Demand offering also runs on top of Amazon
EC2 service spanning different zones.

Mindtouch
wiki is built on top of Mindtouch Dream platform, an Open Source
library for .NET, that makes creation and interoperability with RESTful
web services a snap. This platform plays a major role in ensuring the
ease with which mashups could be done on Mindtouch Wiki. Mindtouch
Dream Platform is released under Apache 2.0 license which permits users
to modify or remix the software.

Mindtouch
has been aggressively pushing the idea of Web Oriented Architecture
(WOA) as the basis for the development of their platform that could
seamlessly interoperate with other web services. In fact, Mindtouch
CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, gave a powerful talk at Gluecon explaining the
different aspects of WOA. According to him, WOA = REST + WWW
Technologies. It is both an architectural style and a technology stack
that makes machine to machine interactions easy. Some of the advantages
of WOA are the agile development, easy to scale and lower TCO. Unlike
WSDL, WOA is simple and easy to implement.

Building
their platform using WOA has made it so powerful and it is not only
used to develop their Wiki collaboration suite but also other
applications by third parties. I have been vigorously pushing the idea
of the importance of Open Source in a SaaS based world in my talks at
various conferences. One of the reasons I cite to highlight this
importance is the concept of reusable code shared by different SaaS
vendors. Such a sharing saves both time and money for vendors. One of
the examples I quote in this regard is the Mindtouch Dream platform.
This open source platform has been used by Shelfari (now acquired by
Amazon) to build author pages. This platform is extensible and the very
fact that it is built using the WOA architectural style makes it better
suited for decentralized approach to innovation.

This
power of this platform is well highlighted when it is used in an
enterprise environment where the wiki is mashed up with enterprise
systems, email, customer databases, etc. and, also, with other online
services like search, maps, social networking, etc.. Mindtouch
enterprise wiki breaks all the data silos inside an organization
bringing all the information into one powerful wiki based interface. It
also serves as a powerful enterprise dashboard bringing together people
within an organization and collaborate seamlessly with one another.

Small
businesses are very flexible and they are slowly moving to SaaS for all
their application needs. However, enterprises are always slow in
embracing new technologies. Mindtouch announced a desktop productivity
suite last week that will help enterprise customers use Mindtouch Wiki
with their existing software applications. The suite includes

• Aurelia Reporter:
  This is integrated into any Windows application and allows users to
  publish as MindTouch 2009 pages. In short, this converts non
  collaborative apps like Microsoft Project™, Visio™, PowerPoint™,
  Excel™, Quickbooks™, etc. and turns them into collaborative apps.

• Desktop Connector:
  Similar to Windows explorer and helps users drag and drop files into
  Mindtouch Wiki from their desktops while maintaining the existing
  hierarchy.

• Microsoft Word™ and Outlook™ Connectors: These connectors allows Word and Outlook users to directly publish from these applications to Mindtouch Wiki.

These
tools will help enterprise users tap into the powerful collaborative
environment offered by Mindtouch Wiki without changing their existing
workflow. In fact, based on my experience, Mindtouch Wiki has the
potential and features to replace the expensive Microsoft Sharepoint in
the business IT environment. In short, it is a powerful product
supported by a passionate company and any smart business will take
advantage of their low cost but enterprise grade collaboration suite.

Related Articles From Zemanta:

• MindTouch Releases Collaborative Desktop Suite (readwriteweb.com)