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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.

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