MindTouch
MindTouch Inc. describes itself as "the leader in Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Networks" and further claims that "MindTouch combines the speed, agility and ease of use of a wiki with the scalability, security and integration of an enterprise portal". Looking at the maturity of their technology, their stated technical aims and the ease-of-use and "mashability" their technology provides, we are intrigued by the possibility of adjusting the Platform technology roadmap in the direction of achieving interoperability with MindTouch Core, the free and open source component of their technology.
We will set up a test installation to assess the feasibility of such a path. The key issue of concern is how much of the "enterprise class" functionality has been preserved in the open source version and to assess how much work it would be to re-create our records and portal structure on the new foundation of MindTouch Core, versus the work involved in completing our prototype system using our RecordAdmin solution based on MediaWiki. We believe that embracing "All Aspects Changeable" as a criterion means we need to be ready to embrace new technologies to achieve our goals with. As we discussed elsewhere however, the next step from completing the prototype will be the technology-independent specification of Platform technology anyway, which means it would not be worth investing an inordinate amount of resources (i.e. developer man-hours) into changing over to the MindTouch solution.
Further questions of note at this stage are:
- How far does the technology integrate with the desktop? They are not offering pre-loaded ISOs on their website for sale or download. Compare with our milestone 2. See: http://www.mindtouch.com/Products/Features/Desktop_Tools
- How does our robot framework "mash-up" with MindTouch? Related - Is MediaWiki content easy to transfer across or keep in sync with MindTouch systems?
- How does the technology relate to groupware applications and does it integrate with desktop applications like Thunderbird, e.g. shared contacts, calendars, meeting invites, etc. See: http://www.mindtouch.com/Products/Features/Desktop_Tools
- Can users easily create and manage software applications as "packages" that can have release management and offer subscriptions directly to other users of the system?
- Can people use the system itself to improve the system and can they collaborate with other clients or users of the system; do they have access to "global" statistics, templates, reports, interfaces? That is can the system run as a unified network?
- What are the multilingual capabilities of the system?
- Can the system be applied to the collaborative editing of ontologies?
- Are semantic annotations available for forms?
Initial analysis
- Large developer community with many plugins
- Strong corporate support
- Intranet/internet operation, network oriented system
- Looks like a mash-up that still runs an old MediaWiki fork which isn't a good sign, but maybe the new 2010 version will be independent of that.
- Very confusing especially concerning groups and roles (which are purely permissions based roles)
- No high-level conceptual frame work for organisational structure, portals or workflow
- No person integration or organisational roles
- Doesn't seem to be any forms, data or querying aspect like SMW or RA
- Only a very cut-down version is open source and rest is centralised
- No concept of application or content packages
