ReadWriteWeb

Technical documentation platform provider MindTouch tonight announced an interesting new feature in its flagship product: MindTouch Contextual Help. The feature offers the ability to integrate collaboratively written documentation inline into web and desktop application interfaces, instead of only publishing it as a standalone document elsewhere. In contrast, forums, PDFs and other standalone Help systems are "antiquated" and see low user engagement, the company says.

This would be quite a development for any Content Management System but it's even more intriguing when considered in light of MindTouch's initial product years ago: an open source Wiki that could display dynamic, programmatically piped-in data from 3rd party services. In a way, Mindtouch is still that - but nine months ago the company launched a platform specifically intended to serve customers building technical support documents. From the ultimate in wide open publishing technology, Mindtouch has now focused on infusing the same type of functionality into the interfaces of more traditionally created software. You might say it's a story of Read/Write technology growing up. Will it work? If it doesn't trade too much simplicity for this newfound sophistication, it very well could.

We'll start a three-part series next week that explores how community is changing in the enterprise.

The three elements that we will be addressing in the series are external communities, internal communities and the relevance of communities to the cloud.

This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features.

We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the space as a whole and improvement over last year. Each of these products either changed the game, or won it.

Platform development - it has to be one of the most discussed topics in the past few months and an exciting space to watch as the world of the open Web shifts to the emerging micro app universe.

Recently we have noticed that platforms with specific purposes are faring well as they provide ways for developers to connect the Web to the mobile universe in manners that are specific to a community.

For example, MindTouch is launching a service today that it calls a technical communications suite.

Curation is increasingly crucial for finding the most important and relevant information on the Web. It's used to point out insights which would not have ordinarily been discovered in the wash of data that overwhelms us in our daily lives.

The concept of curation can also be applied to the often-forgotten world of product documentation.

For the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week we will take a look specifically how the enterprise is adopting enterprise technologies. What services are companies using and why?

Dachis Group is one of the fastest growing consulting organizations in the Enterprise 2.0 space. In the past several months they've made a series of acquisitions, including the purchase of the Hinhcliffe Group.

So, it's noteworthy what technologies Dachis Group is adopting for its clients. Recently, the company adopted MindTouch as a platform for its collaboration laboratory.

MindTouch has developed a top 20 list of the most powerful voices in open-source, compiled using Twitter and other sources. It's a good example of how a research project can be transparent and in the process, help garner thought leadership for both the individual and the company.

MindTouch Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman wrote a blog post yesterday, discussing the project and how they came to their findings.

Recently, SAP showed us its new, cloud-based enterprise collaboration service called 12Sprints. It embraces consumer services and activity streams correlating to the context of the business use, in particular collaboration among teams and groups.

Since that demo a few weeks ago, our views about the SAP service have changed a bit. In particular now that Google Buzz is part of the picture and conversations we have had recently with companies like Jive Software.

It's evident that the landscape is changing. 12Sprints, Jive Software and a host of other enterprise services have solidified the belief that the enterprise expects applications to be social. Enterprise vendors are hearing that pretty clearly from their customers.

Fujitsu has integrated MindTouch technology into its scanner technology. The service means that people can feed documents through a Fujitsu scanner and then automatically post them to the MindTouch cloud-based collaboration service. Documents will be uploaded, stored, shared and processed into a web-oriented environment.

It's the cloud factor that makes this interesting. Scanning documents into a cloud-based environment has a number of implications for markets that still rely on antiquated storage practices. For example, this is the kind of application that would seem to be applicable for law firms that now use warehouses to store millions of paper documents.

SnapLogic is one of those kinds of companies we run across where we can say, "Yes, these guys get it." The company provides data integration services that snaps information from the enterprise, social networks and the web.

MindTouch is a company we have written a lot about lately. MindTouch provides a presentation layer that, for instance, shows information from multiple data sources in a dashboard environment.

Now the two companies are teaming up to provide Business Application Integrations (BAI), which are systems that the companies say make for affordable enterprise integration services that are cheaper by a significant magnitude compared to traditional offerings.