The New MindTouch Collaborative Intranet: Way More Than Just Wiki

Written by Steven Walling / June 23, 2009 9:40 AM / 6 Comments

MindTouch, the collaborative software that began as a fork of MediaWiki, has just launched the first of three new turnkey collaborative networks for the enterprise that go far beyond the software's beginnings as a wiki.

With the next two scheduled to be made public in the next six months, this first new release is of the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

This intranet is focused on taking all the information from your legacy applications and integrating them in to the much more accessible interface that MindTouch has inherited from its other open source and enterprise implementations. The goal is to take the resources you need and break down the silos that separate them to create a fabric of information that is easy to comb through and work with.

Collaborative Networks

Earlier this month, CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, wrote a post for GigaOM's OStatic on the future of what he describes as collaborative networks, and it's this term that underlies the new strategy by MindTouch.

In direct juxtaposition to social networks, collaborative networks are group-oriented and driven by clear objectives, rather than being communicative in nature. The criticism of social networks and social software as being centered on one-on-one interaction without serious and measurable goals would not only rankle some, it ignores the many-to-many ideal that so many prominent thinkers espouse.

However, Fulkerson's critique of a conversation focus will definitely appeal to the intuition of scores of enterprise software users who don't get the usefulness of, for example, a desktop enterprise microblogging app.

In Practice

The theory and semantics of social versus collaborative network is key in some respects, but when it comes to settling on a piece of software, the enterprise has little time to waste on such debate.

So what does it mean in practice for MindTouch to become a collaborative network instead of an enterprise wiki?

MindTouch has always been big on mashups. But the new Collaborative Intranet takes the power to combine data sources and brings much more structure to the equation. Business users will get a more wiki-like way of editing and collaborating, but from information sources they're assured to be familiar with, such as CRMs, ERPS and SharePoint.

What's Next

The MindTouch Collaborative Intranet is just the first step for the company in to a trio of solutions that will attempt to edge out traditional enteprise portals of all stripes. With the availability of their first collaborative network, MindTouch is already on the path away from a pure enterprise wiki to a fully-formed collaborative platform.

Comments

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Very cool. But this market is as yet untested. There are many enterprise social networking products but the enterprises have not picked up on them yet.

Posted by: Ravikant | June 23, 2009 11:21 AM

@Ravikant,

Thanks for your comments. However, MindTouch does not provide social networking. What we do is very different and is similar to a collaborative and agile portal/intranet.

As for untested, I can report MindTouch has many millions of users and many hundreds of thousands of active installations. Customers include: Intuit, Microsoft, The Washington Post, US Army, Timberland, Palm, etc. MindTouch is no more "untested" than Microsoft SharePoint.

Posted by: Aaron Fulkerson | June 23, 2009 12:48 PM

How interesting. The contrast between social networking and collaborative networking is very interesting. It seems that collaborative networking is much more along the lines of what will be required for something like the future development of entirely internet based journalism. Social networking as found on facebook and twitter have served citizen journalists well thus far to get information out of difficult situations (Iran's current state, for example) but it doesn't do much towards actually organizing and making accessible the information coming out of somewhere like Iran. The "Global Voices Online" site in contrast seeks to organize and unify the flood of information being offered by citizen journalists around the world. Something like this form of collaborative networking would probably serve them well. There are some great interviews with top journalists about challenges and opportunities for the future of journalism at http://www.ourblook.com/component/option,com_sectionex/Itemid,200076/id,8/view,category/#catid69 which I have found very useful for some of these issues.

Posted by: Bill | June 23, 2009 2:06 PM

Addressing the comment above, The MindTouch Collaborative Network Intranets are primarily focused at the enterprise and not citizen journalism. It's possible to create a version for citizen media - just need an enterprising company or individual to create one on top of the MindTouch platform.

Posted by: Mark | June 24, 2009 6:47 PM

@Bill,

While Mark is correct in writing MindTouch is focused on enterprise needs there are many major media companies that use MindTouch to create Collaborative Networks. One good example is The Washington Post (WPNI). Here's an example of Collaborative Network about politically influential persons in DC: http://www.whorunsgov.com

Posted by: Aaron Fulkerson | June 28, 2009 9:32 AM