2008/06/17

The wiki interface to MindTouch Deki began as a MediaWiki fork. Over the last three years this component of MindTouch Deki has evolved into the heir apparent to the reigning wiki champion. Due to the overwhelming demand MindTouch developed a MediaWiki to MindTouch Deki converter that upgrades MediaWiki in it's entirety, including templates, categories, attachments, etc. The MediaWiki to MindTouch Deki converter was most recently utilized by Mozilla Corp, a MindTouch Enterprise customer, to upgrade their MediaWiki powered Developer Center to MindTouch Deki. The Mozilla conversion involved 120,000 pages of content with multilingual support for 18 languages. MindTouch has been selling MediaWiki to MindTouch Deki certified upgrades for a couple months now. However, from now until the end of July, MindTouch will upgrade MediaWiki powered sites to MindTouch Deki free of charge with the purchase of MindTouch Deki Enterprise Standard support package.

Additionally, a community authored guide for upgrading MediaWiki to MindTouch Deki has been written by enthusiastic members of MindTouch's developer community. The instruction guide is very lengthy and requires a high level of technical experience. In fact, it's safe to say you need a 3rd degree black belt in Linux system administration and a brown belt in MySQL and Bash. Contact us by clicking below and we'll send you the documentation.

We get a lot of press at MindTouch, most of which is in the US media about the strengths of our MindTouch Deki Enterprise platform. On June 24th the Australia Financial Review, a well respected media outlet, published a great article about MindTouch Deki that we are very proud of.

“MindTouch gives away a first-class solution, and trusts that users will be so impressed that they will happily pay… for expert support.”

MindTouch will be hosting DekiCon on Wednesday the 16th of July, 2008. DekiCon is a MindTouch Deki developers conference and is open to the entire MindTouch Community at no charge. DekiCon starts at 6:00 PM at the MindTouch office in San Diego. Dinner and refreshments will be provided.

Leading the presentations will be Steve Bjorg, CTO and cofounder, and Damien Howley, our resident CSS expert. Steve will be presenting advanced topics including DekiScript and the creation of XML extensions for MindTouch Deki. Damien will lead an in-depth look at the file architecture of our most popular visual template, Fiesta. He will also educate attendees on the mechanics of Fiesta skinning.

OpenGarden.org has taken its rightful place as the MindTouch Developer Center (MDC). For now, not much has changed except for the new address: http://developer.mindtouch.com. Your login continues to work and the old URLs you bookmarked are redirected automatically. But in the coming weeks and months, we'll be giving MDC a facelift and improving the overall site structure in order to make it easier to find, contribute, and connect with fellow community members.

Why the name change?
There were really two needs we had to address. First, the artificial dichotomy between OpenGarden and MindTouch created some confusion for new members. Second, there was some overlap in content between MindTouch and OpenGarden, which caused confusion as to the purposes of the two sites. Going forward MDC will be specifically tailored to address the needs of those who want to get the most out of the capabilities, extensions, API, and the multi-platform support of MindTouch Deki.  

If you want to learn more about how:

• MindTouch Deki can upgrade your existing IT infrastructure by delivering an easy to use collaboration layer,
• enable you to create dashboards, dynamic reports and mashups from your existing systems and data sources,
• or improve how your company captures and re-uses files and intelligence

It has been an exceptional two years since we first released MindTouch Deki at the OSCON '06 conference in Portland, OR. In this short time we’ve had many successes. We’ve established ourselves as leaders and innovators in the rapidly growing Enterprise 2.0 and Social Enterprise Software space. As a leader in this burgeoning space, MindTouch has acquired hundreds of fantastic customers, such as ABB, Mozilla, Intel, Fujitsu, Avaya, Siemens, BP, FedEx and others.

In recognition of our success we're hosting a "Freedom Celebration" at this year's OSCON conference in Portland, OR. The event will take place on July 23rd at 7pm. We’re hosting the event a block away from the Portland Convention Center (where OSCON is hosted) on the 6th floor lounge and terrace of the Red Lion Hotel. MindTouch welcomes you to come and enjoy the evening of great music, free beer and good company.

MindTouch Deki now provides a seamless single sign on experience with the newly added support for auto-login via NTLM. Windows users can login to their computer with a domain account and be automatically logged into MindTouch Deki. Of course, you can also limit access to pages or spaces for these users by relying on local, LDAP, or Active Directory groups and you may still assign permissions on a user by user basis.

In our never ending effort to deliver the absolute best collaboration tool ever developed we're always eliciting feedback from our users and customers. To easily get your input we've setup a short survey that will take you about two minutes to complete. Anyone who completes the survey will be entered into a drawing for a 1 GB iPod Shuffle. I look forward to your feedback. 

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