MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.
MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.
MindTouch Cloud is meant for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform.
It's also another example of how enterprise technologies are increasingly designed so the average business user may perform tasks that have traditionally been the domain of the IT department.
What differentiates MindTouch from Sharepoint and other services is its emphasis on the data. Users may collaborate across multiple enterprise systems and web applications.
MindTouch Cloud is an enterprise mashup service. Business critical information can be exported from enterprise systems and mashed up to create reports and build applications. It has the requirements for the enterprise, including authentication using LDAP, single-sign on security. Role management is built into the service with the capability to create new users, roles and groups.
Compare that to Salesforce Chatter and you see some similarities in how applications can be integrated to create an intelligent dashboard environment that fits into an enterprise environment.
MindTouch does need some work on its user interface. But it has all the features that can make it a valuable service for a business looking to build dashboards that can mashup enterprise data and external applications.
This is MindTouch's first cloud computing effort. Pricing starts at $7 per user per month.
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.....Are companies realy using wikis to collaborate....maybe some techincal teams.....maybe...is a wiki the best tool for collabration in the enterprise....maybe for they are good for document repositories....for me the issues is more around continuing to propogate more unstructerd data that has to eventaully be spidered and searched using expensive enterprise search soultions....does mindtouch charge for connectors to other data services ?.....Also it would be nice when using the words "Open Source" if an explansion were given explaing what the Mindtouch code base is and what would be required to have it up and running
Good notes on Mindtouch.
As an FYI, your first link to Mindtouch goes to Mindshare.com - darn those auto-completes... ;)
It's hard not to mention Google after reading this. My company uses Google Sites as a "company wiki" to manage all our content and collaborate. And the price of this is included in the cost for their business edition: $50/user/YEAR. And what about Google Wave as collaboration tool? And that's FREE.
correction: the price starts at $10/per user per month, minimum of 10 users. It doesn't go down to $7/mth until you get to 50 users. So the actual starting price is $100 per month.