MindTouch

Infobox Company
name = MindTouch

type = Private
foundation = January 2005
location_city = San Diego.
location_country = USA
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key_people = Aaron Roe Fulkerson (CEO)
Steve G. Bjorg (CTO)
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homepage = [http://www.mindtouch.com MindTouch.com]
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MindTouch is an open source software development company based in San Diego, California, USA. It was founded January, 2005 with offices in Saint Paul, Minnesota and Bellevue, Washington, but merged all offices in San Diego, California in February 2007.

History

MindTouch began its development work with MediaWiki, the open source wiki program used for the Wikimedia Foundation sites. The first public software release was at OSCON, the open source conference in Portland, OR, July 25, 2006 at which time MindTouch also launched the MindTouch Developer Community (once named OpenGarden.org). This initial release was a MediaWiki fork called Deki Wiki "Gooseberry" and it differed by including a WYSIWYG editor on XHTML, improved search capabilities that also indexed files, page-level file attachments, enhanced permissioning and more. MindTouch also release in July 2006 MindTouch Dream, a distributed REST application management framework.

At DEMOFall in September 2006, MindTouch released its first commercial product, the DekiBox smart hardware appliance. In January 2006, MindTouch quickly migrated the wikis hosted at Wiki.com to Wik.is before the former site was taken down due to domain ownership issues.

A year after the initial MindTouch Deki Wiki product release, timed for OSCON 2007, MindTouch released a rewrite of the initial Deki Wiki product that consisted of a decoupled wiki interface to a composition of heterogeneous web-services and a web-service orchestration engine. The new platform allows users to integrate web-services and external applications to extend MindTouch Deki Wiki with remote application behavior and enables data and application mashups.

In June, 2008 MindTouch dropped the "wiki" part of the product name; thereby renaming the product to MindTouch Deki. MindTouch CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, cited in the June Corporate Newsletter a motivation to more accurately communicate the capabilities of the product and the fact the wiki is only a component in the enterprise collaboration and integration platform's overall feature set.

Current technology

Deki Wiki is an open source wiki developed in C# on Mono and PHP, with all components available under either version 2 of the GNU General Public License or version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License; this makes it the first commercial open source virtualized wiki. The DREAM framework makes it possible to extend Deki Wiki using any programming language compatible with Web services. The application's logic is implemented in C#, but the presentation layer in PHP, which makes it relatively simple to modify the user interface.

External links

* [http://www.mindtouch.com/ MindTouch website]
* [http://MindTouch.com/Technology Technology summary]
* [http://developer.mindtouch.com] is MindTouch's developer community
* [http://www.wik.is Wik.is] a free SaaS offering of MindTouch Deki Express
* [http://weblog.infoworld.com/tcdaily/archives/2007/02/review_mindtouc.html Infoworld Review]
* [http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2006fall/79894.php DEMOFall]
* [http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/tech/personaltech/20070205-9999-mz1b5five.html Talk with Ken Liu, CEO MindTouch]
* [http://charlotte.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2007/02/05/daily4.html MindTouch Goes West] , [http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/16610733.htm]
* [http://www.collaborationloop.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1944&Itemid=45. MindTouch Unveils Commercial Wiki Virtual Appliance]
* [http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/firstlook/2007/06/scalable_wikis_made_easy_by_mi.php Reprint of the Wall Street Journal article about MindTouch]
* [http://developer.mozilla.org] is powered by MindTouch Deki

See also

* Comparison of wiki software
* List of content management systems
* List of wiki software