In a word, the release allows Microsoft-rooted corporate networks to keep information in a shared, collaborative environment rather than locked in individual PCs' "application silos." The suite includes Aurelia Reporter (for publishing and sharing versioned documents), Desktop Connector (for dragging and dropping files or directories into the MindTouch environment), and Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors (for one-click publishing of documents, threaded conversations, and attachments). These tools enable working via web browsers and permit collaboration without installed software.

"MindTouch is pretty unique in what we're doing," said MindTouch founder and CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, in a phone conversation last night. "Most people deploy our service behind a firewall and use it as a wiki. You don't have to be a programmer to deploy it, and it lets you connect systems and get real-time data from other systems, applications, and databases."

When considering the scope, scalability, and depth of the features MindTouch offers, Fulkerson noted that there is little comparison between Google Docs or similar offerings, which he feels only work well for small businesses.

This point could be convincingly countered by Google, which has been promoting its premier suite applications as suitable and scalable for large enterprises. As we wrote yesterday, auto supplier company Valeo is now deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.

Still, Fulkerson by no means considers MindTouch to be dwelling in the shadow of a much larger competitor.

"Because we have a web-oriented architecture, IT and business users can do rapid application development on the platform, which takes weeks instead of months. Also because of the WOA, it makes it easy for MindTouch to develop the productivity tools on the desktop. And it's easy for users to adapt MindTouch to how they work and get more value out of other systems they're using."

"Whatever your workflow is," he continued, "MindTouch allows you to get more out of it. Microsoft Office docs can be published to MindTouch. It's taggable, searchable, editable from the web, sharable through a URL or email or Twitter DMs or chat IMs, and usable in a way it would never be if it was trapped on your desktop."

The Desktop Connector feature allows users to drag and drop any kind of document or even whole directories into MindTouch. All files then become web-based, searchable, etc. For richly formatted documents with images, even the formatting gets imported.

The new Aurelia Reporter in Desktop Suite is particularly impressive. It allows any Windows document to be published as a MindTouch page. That page is then accessible from a web browser and editable even if the user doesn't have the software on their PCs. As with all MindTouch pages, the content is editable, indexed for search, versioned, and able to be permissioned for specific users and groups.

And with Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors, email threads are publishable and searchable by any involved users and from multiple sources.

WhoRunsGov.com is the Post's new site where readers can learn background information about the new Obama administration, members of congress, prominent military officials and others who now "run government."

Old Media, New Guts?

WhoRunsGov is built on a Mindtouch Dekiwiki, the same sophisticated platform used by many other organizations to assemble data-centric application sites built largely on mashups. We've seen some awesome work done by IBM with a Dekiwiki for example, pulling in data using Dapper and mashing it up with maps APIs.

WhoRunsGov, on the other hand, looks mostly like a content site right now. A mix of political news and a would-be search engine magnet in the form of 240 pages about high profile political figures. The site is a moderated wiki, it includes blogs and it aggregates relevant news coverage from the Post and around the web. That's cool, but it sure could be cooler.

Earlier this month the Post hired political blogging star Greg Sargent away from Talking Points Memo to write the lead blog on WhoRunsGov. Sargent's posts should be good and popular, but we'd love to see them augmented with content based in a paradigm fresher than the old broadcast media. There's a lot of third party data that could be pulled in to WhoRunsGov and there's outbound APIs that could make it a much more valuable site, ultimately increasing its draw and traffic.

Five Projects Doing It Better

What would that look like? For some inspiring examples, check out Little Sis, described as "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited & maintained by people like you." If you remember the Flash visualization theyrule.net, Little Sis is of the same vein, but a living site.

Little Sis is getting a lot of love from the Sunlight Foundation and its grand slam site OpenCongress.

The UK Guardian is doing a lot of things in this direction, most notably their initiative Free Our Data, where they are agitating for release of public data for the purpose of mashups. That's pretty hot.

The New York Times has released multiple APIs and just announced a conference called Times Open, "for developers interested in working with NYTimes.com as a news and information platform." (Disclosure: the NYTimes is a syndication partner of this site.)

The coolest political tech initiative we've seen in a long time is Memeorandum Colors, a Greasemonkey script on top of some really innovative data mining to determine the political leanings of blogs participating in the hottest online discussions each day.

Compared to those kinds of initiatives, WhoRunsGov looks a bit boring so far. There's a lot of potential though, and we hope to see the Washington Post's new initiative develop with more impact than it had when it came out of the gate.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.

Head on over to Jobwire to find out about other new hires at RedHat, MindTouch, Stack Overflow and more.

We're reporting on 10 to 15 new hires in tech and new media every day at Jobwire. From executives to engineers, if you've got a new job or your company has made a new hire - let us know!

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

MindTouch also announced that Deki Wiki has been chosen as the new framework to power the Mozilla Developer Community site, some great validation for a company that often seems to stand so far out on the bleeding edge that it could make potential users feel uneasy.

Below is a video about the polyglot support, we recommend readers click the "menu" button and then select the very nice full-screen view in the top right of the Viddler video player.

This latest release includes a long list of other new features, including the ability to block particular users and IP addresses and a multi-asset file uploader that's pretty slick, even if it still isn't as good as Viddler's - which is the best on the web.

Deki Wiki is free to use and the company sells premium support packages.