MindTouch, Inc.

MindTouch, Inc.

MindTouch logo
Type	Private
Founded	January 2005
Headquarters	San Diego., USA
Key people	Aaron Roe Fulkerson (CEO) Steve G. Bjorg (CTO) Roy Kim (VP Engineering) Mark Fidelman (eVP Sales) Rion Morgenstern (Director)
Products	MindTouch 2009, MindTouch Core
Website	mindtouch.com

MindTouch, Inc., an open-source software-development company based in San Diego, California, USA, started in January, 2005 with offices in Saint Paul, Minnesota and Bellevue, Washington. It merged all its 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 took place 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, a MediaWiki fork called Deki Wiki "Gooseberry", differed by including a WYSIWYG editor on XHTML and providing enhanced search capabilities that also indexed files, page-level file attachments, enhanced permissioning and more. MindTouch also released a distributed REST application management framework called MindTouch Dream in July 2006.

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 business collaboration and integration platform's overall feature set.

The Mozilla Developer Center, the developer site for people using Mozilla open-source products, uses MindTouch software.

Technology as of 2010

MindTouch Deki consists of 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 MindTouch using any programming language compatible with web services. The application's logic is implemented in C# and the presentation layer in PHP, which makes it relatively simple to modify the user interface.

Public websites using MindTouch

• The Mozilla Development Community wiki is powered by MindTouch Deki
• http://www.topsan.org/ - "The Open Protein Structure Annotation Network” - a place to collect, share and distribute information about protein three-dimensional structures
• http://www.whorunsgov.com - A Washington Post user-editable site to profile leaders in government

External links

• Company web site
• MindTouch developer community
• Review: MindTouch cleverly packs wiki in a virtual appliance Infoworld
• MindTouch Unveils Commercial Wiki Virtual Appliance
• Wikis at Work The Wall Street Journal

See also

• Comparison of wiki software
• List of content management systems
• List of wiki software
• Collaborative Networks