Mindquarry Blog

Meet us at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin and Receive 100EUR Off

2007-10-11T08:35:18+00:00

Mindquarry will exhibit at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin. Come and visit us! We are happy to provide a special offer to you: Get 100EUR off or a free expo pass. All you need to do is click here to register and the link will carry you to the registration form automatically detecting your special discount.

The free expo pass will allow you to visit us at our booth for free. Please leave a comment below to let us know you'll be there.

See you in Berlin!

Mindquarry closes commercial operations

2007-10-04T10:00:01+00:00

Mindquarry closes it's commercial operations. We did a long fight to avoid that. But we became meanwhile a little company, depending on financial support. Without that we must try going other ways. Lars will for sure not stop to support the community, as long as the community will exist. I will try to support Mindquarry from my personal blog iqupi's world.

A final summary:

The Minus Side

Mindquarry has not finished the product as a stable version in the way it was intended.
The hosting engine, designed to run on the Amazon server cloud EC2 / S3 has not been finished and reached just a kind of alpha stadium, mainly from a lack of developer resources. That made it impossible to launch Mindquarry GO in time.
Mainly due to that facts, Mindquarry lost the confidence of its investors what prevented to continue the commercial operations.

The Plus Side

Mindquarry has gathered a inspired and motivated team, build up a community, delivered a product within one year, developed a leading hosting engine pilot for the Amazon server cloud and created a known brand with the potential to become a key player in the collaboration marked. Customers from all over the world supported us and were waiting for our professional offers.

So what?

We are proud of the company and our community. We want to thank all people who have set trust in us and supported us. It was our goal, to make a software for better collaboration, to give you a one hand solution for virtually teams. That task was perhaps to big for one year.

Should we have tried less? I don't think so. Mindquarry is a virtual team solution, providing the needed resources in a single point of access. That makes the Mindquarry software unique.

But we should have done it step by step with better quality in each step to release reliable software suitable for a customer basis. We simply did not do it that way because we had planned with more time for developing our operations.

This is perhaps the end of the Mindquarry company as we know it today. This is not yet the end of the Mindquarry product and it's community.

Mindquarry GO Prices Announced

2007-08-08T13:41:10+00:00

Today, we published the prices for Mindquarry GO, our pay-as-you-go on-demand offer. With Mindquarry GO, you sign up and start with team collaboration online - no installation, configuration nor troubleshooting is required.

You can already sign up for the "Max" package providing 100 GB of storage for team content. All other packages will be available September 10.

Find more information at www.mindquarry.com/go/sign-up.

This week for Mindquarry

2007-08-03T16:38:16+00:00

As I will be offline for the most of the next week and the last week has been one of the most interesting and successful ones for Mindquarry so far, I would like to recap the events of this week in a short blog post:

Monday

I wrote in my weblog about the faced search for tasks in Mindquarry 1.2, which has been picked up later by Stephan and Michael Sampson, and Forum User BeneM contributed a patch that further improved this feature. Thank you.

Wednesday

We had a very interesting talk with Jonathan B. Spira of Basex who is an expert in the collaboration business and monitoring the knowledge economy for years.
We launched Mindquarry PRO, our offering for enterprise customers
We re-worked our Homepage and have now clearly defined sections for Mindquarry DO, Mindquarry GO and Mindquarry PRO

Thursday

I finished my article "Elements of Collaboration" which lists some of the most popular tools and methodologies for knowledge worker collaboration. Since then it has been picked up by some blogs, for example the Bumble Bee. Thank you.
We rolled out a new version of Mindquarry GO, which means we can now activate an order of magnitude more users for Mindquarry GO beta than we already did. If you are waiting in line for a Mindquarry GO account, the wait is over soon.
I started discussing new features and implementation in Mindquarry 1.3, the main focus of this release is user and permission management.

Friday

Alexander Saar released the first version of a Mindquarry Plugin for Eclipse Mylyn that allows you to track your tasks in Mindquarry right from your Eclipse IDE.
Mindquarry (as a product and as a company) is featured by Linux.com. Thank you Joe and Tina.
Opensource Tutor.com describes how to set up a collaborative learning environment with Mindquarry and Granule

If you want to stay up to date with everything that happens in the Mindquarry community, do not forget to check Planet Mindquarry and the Mindquarry Forum.

New Product: 'Mindquarry PRO' Includes Professional Support and Admin Tools

2007-08-02T14:17:57+00:00

Today, we announced Mindquarry PRO, our enterprise-grade offering, which includes:

The most reliable, secure stable version of Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software.
Mindquarry PRO allows system administrators to continously monitor the teamwork software and identify critical problems before they arise.
The support package included in Mindquarry PRO ensures high availability of Mindquarry installations with a guaranteed response time and unlimited number of incidents to safeguard maintenance. Aditionally, Mindquarry PRO customers can exclusively buy consulting or development services for system integration matters.

The product's home and further information is available at http://www.mindquarry.com/pro.

Submit a Case Study - Win an iPod

2007-07-17T16:25:07+00:00

Tell us before August 8th:

Do you use Mindquarry?
Did you install it for someone else who is using it?

... and win an iPod Shuffle!

Submit a Case Study

Collaboration 2.0: First steps with Mindquarry, part 3: The "How to start" for team members

2007-07-17T16:21:52+00:00

In my previous guidelines I was summarizing up the first steps for administrators and the basic principles of the Mindquarry collaboration way. To recapitulate, we learned ho the administrator is setting up teams and users and whats the idea behind the file section, the wiki and the tasks. Now it's your turn, team members. Are you ready?

Well although some of you might yelling "I'm ready, I'm ready" like yellow squares, there are still some pieces of advice left: So sit tight and read on.

3. A "Howto" for first day Mindquarry users

Now you got your login and you are eger to use Mindquarry. You already logged in. You'll arrived at the landing page for first users. It looks nice (at least some think so) with it's fat icons for each functionality: teams, files, wiki, tasks and (soon) talk. Now take a close look to that beauty, because you'll perhaps never again run into that page. ;-) I'll tell you lather why.

I recommend to start at the team page, just to get a overview about your initial rights and settings. Hit the fat red team button.

3.1 teams: your initial rights

You'll arrive at the "all your teams page" This is the best page for newbies because most things you can do have the same result: you can choose your current team by either selecting it from the center of the page, from the left navigation bar or from the list box in your navigation button, labeled "all your teams" above the page title.

Why should you choose a team?

Each team has it's own workspace with a on wiki, a own file section, own tasks and own team members. You can work much more focussed by having just the necessary resources for one team You can change your team workspace at any time and in every section by select a new team from the left navigation bar or from the list box in your navigation button, labeled "all your teams" above the page title.

Do I see every team?

No. You see just the teams were you are in. If you think you should participate on other teams (if there are other teams) you can be added by any of the appendant team members or the administrator.

3.2 teams: your initial user settings

Now choose a team. The page headline become the team name and you see a short description of the team objectives (if your administrator created one) and a list of all team members. They all should be there, Jack Jones, Kate King, Linda Lobster ... and You. But what is that? Most of them have a nice picture and you got that 10 years old graduation picture? Your description says you are "a c++ programmer" but you are already "a ruby-on-rails expert"? Don't worry! Look at the almost upper right corner. There are 3 small icons, and the middle one is looking like a business card. Don' hesitate and click on it. Now you are in the "change user profile form". I explained a similar form already in my first article chapter "1.1 Add all possible users". Here you can change your photo (The picture should be .jpg or .png format. It should be quadratic with at least 48*48 pixels, but it can be bigger). You can change your password and last not least your skill description. So you load up a pretty cool picture with your new hairstyle and you overwrite "a c++ programmer" with "a ruby-on-rails expert". Now click the "change profile" button so save your changes. If you changed your password, save the changes with "change password".

3.3 Set up your file section

In chapter "2.2 Files" you've probably learned about the collaboration server. Each time you synchronize, you get a copy of your team files. But how to upload the first files to the server? A catch22 ? No, it's that easy:

The first team space user creates on his desktop a file directory (like c:/teams/marketing for the marketing team) with all sub-directories and files the according team space should contain and then just sync your desktop with your Mindquarry server. All files and sub-directories will be uploaded. Now all the other team members with just an empty "c:/teams/marketing" synchronize too and get the files and subdirectories downloaded. Now they may add some more files and sync again and so on.

(Note: Instead of "c:/teams/marketing" can every team member have a different location like "c:/documents/marketing" or "d:/teams/documents/marketing" as long as that is the location they used as local storage path during the desktop client installation: "c:/teams/", or "c:/documents/" or "d:/teams/documents/". ) If you are a member of other teams too, like Sales, the local sales files pace is in the same local path, like "c:/teams/sales".

3.4 Create a welcome wiki page

In each team or project is often a keeper. (lucky if you have one) This part is for those kind of team members.

I suggest to initiate a kind of "welcome wiki page" Describe the teams goals and objective, create a page for rules or a glossary if you have such stuff, start a FAQ page with initial hints for using the wiki or the Mindquarry desktop client. Create a code of conduct page or whatever comes you in mind to help to promote your teams work. By doing that, you'll give your team mates examples of how to use the wiki and some familiarness with the new software as well. Most people need help in mastering a new software environment. We at Mindquarry can do efforts, to keep it easy to use. But to make your team collaboration project a success story we need you.

3.5 Anything else

So now you are ready. Go and try it your way. There is nothing you can do really wrong:

You deleted a file by accident. No problem: go to the file section in your team space, grab the time-slider and go to the last version. double click it and it will be loaded (or downloaded) now safe it and with the next sync it will be uploaded for everyone's use again.

Why will you never see the initial landing page?

I suppose you will set a bookmark to a wiki or a team page. In your daily work there is no need for going back to here. It's just a beauty page for first time users.

So thats for now, folks. I would be glad for your feedback. A great place is here: Submit your user experience. Or write a comment to that post. Or email me at stephan(dot)voigt(at)mindquarry(dot)com

Collaboration 2.0: First steps with Mindquarry, part 2: basic principles

2007-07-16T14:39:31+00:00

In the first part of this collaboration guide I was highlighting the first steps for an administrator to make the system usable for common users. Now I want to say some words about the first steps for common users.

2. Basic Principles

2.1 Teams

Every team represents a group of people with the same rights. What teams are standing for, I've described in part one.

So if you are for example a member of the "Marketing" team and need a kind of sub-group to show results to other people, you'll have to create some more teams like "Interop Las Vegas 2008". To create a new team, you'll currently have to ask your administrator.

But every user can add and remove team members from a team. To do so, go to the team section. On the left side, select your team. Now your teams name is the headline of your page. There you'll see on the upper right side 2 buttons, labeled with "members" and "edit". Hit the "members" button and the "Change Membership" form appears. On the left side are the members of the current team, on the right side are all possibles members left. (Note: if the right side is empty, all possible members are already team members. To add generally new members, ask the administrator) just click in the right side peoples "add member"-link to shift them to the left team side. To remove member from the team, click in the left side peoples "remove member"-link to shift them to the right side with non-members.
Doing the last, you not delete this members, you just exclude them from the current team.

2.2 Files

Mindquarry has a powerful file version control server. For those with more technical interest, the system is based on the Open Source product "subversion". What is the idea behind this technology?

All team members should use the same files and documents with the same file directory tree. And all team members should use always up-to-date files and documents. To do so, the whole teams file directory tree with all files and documents is copied to each user's laptop or desktop computer. The file server is the golden copy and archive.
Who already worked with subversion knows, that this is not the traditional copy procedure. There are more than 20 commands with lots of options each. Basically the subversion server acts like your public library: First the documents have to be registered. Then you "borrow" the document and you "give it back". (Fortunately, the library has enough copies for all readers) If you modified the document, the library treats the modified as the new valid document and keep the previous version for history views.

A very powerful and reliable archive. To keep it simple, we developed a "library broker", a servant for you: The Mindquarry desktop client. He's on your local drive doing all that command stuff for you by one single command: "synchronize".

2.3 How to synchronize?

To synchronize, you have to download the desktop client. Don't worry, it's a smart client, easy to install and easy to remove as well. ("no-footprint-client") To load it down, you have in the file section the big button "synchronize" which will start the download and after the download it starts the desktop client. (Hint: Mac users should download the special mac version) . The installation is easy. You just have to write the local path for you teams main directory, like c:/documents/Marketingteam. After you did so, you can start to create a file directory tree below that directory and add the first files. With your first sync (open the desktop client and hit the button sync) you install a copy of your local file directory "Marketingteam" on the Mindquarry server. Now everyone else from your team can sync and gets the files from your Server.

Every time you change a document or a file you should synchronize your laptop with the team server (or at least once a day). Now the file or document on the server is updated, and the previous file or document is archived. That's why you are able to see all the past versions in your time line at the file section.

But if you don't change the files but others do so?

Every time you synchronize your laptop with the team server, the server checks out the modification date of the files on the server and your local stored files. If there are modified (and therefore newer) files on the server, the server will download them to your laptop. Therefore you can trust to have alway up-to-date and valid documents and files on your working computer after a synchronization. We recommend to synchronize daily, even when you did not change any file.

What happens if 2 people change the same file?

Your desktop client which is used to do the synchronization shows you a conflict message. In that case I recommend not to synchronize. First take a close look to both versions and decide, which you want to keep:

if the server version is better, just erase your local file
if your local version is better, just synchronize and your local version overwrites the server version.

2.4 Knowledge @ Wiki

A wiki is a comfortable way to collect and publish knowledge. It's just easy for every team member to contribute his ideas since that Wiki is very easy to use. (WYSIWYG) Recommended appliances for Wiki's are:

Gather Ideas for new product features, for events or for your maintenance process
Publish common conventions and glossaries like name convention for programmers, step-by-step guides for installations or other reference works
Create user driven documentation by contributions of every team member

To use the wiki just go and try it out. Just some basic important hints:

To start writing hit the edit-button or double click the Wiki text.
Create new pages by linking to them from your current page. Mark a word or phrase and use the icon with the red link symbol (a finger is pointing to a red text line) to make that to a link to that new page. Now save and click the new link which brings you to the new and empty Wiki page.
When you done your editing, don't forget to save! ;-)

2.5 Tasks

Tasks help you to get your daily workload sorted. You can better keep track on your duties and it helps you not to forget to much things. It brings quality and reliability in your work results. Most of you will perhaps use tasks in Outlook or other programs.

Mindquarry tasks are simple to use. They just start with a title and a status. But you see below the label "fields" addition optional fields which can be activated just by clicking on it. Try something, create an own task and one assigned to an other person. Add a due date. just try to find your own way of usage, use them.

Mindquarry tasks will be continuously improved and integrated into the other components and become an important role in the Mindquarry collaboration way.

So thats all for today. Stay tuned for the next part about the first steps for user.

Collaboration 2.0: First steps with Mindquarry

2007-07-13T11:09:14+00:00

You decided to improve your teamwork and got a Mindquarry account, either from the hosted "Mindquarry GO" or from the free download and you already have installed Mindquarry. (did you tell us about your installation in the voluntary registration form? Yes? very good. That helps us a lot to improve our services by knowing our customers) Anyway now you are ready for the first steps:

1. Initial Administration

The first principle you have to learn is that a administrator is a administrator and not a user. So after the installation you have the admin login(pwd admin/admin (if you are using Mindquarry GO you'll get your administarion account by email). As the admin you have the following initial tasks:

add all possible users
create the necessary team spaces
add the first members to the according team

1.1 Add all possible Users

Go to the teams section. On the right side you'll see 2 buttons: "new user", "new team". Hit the new user button and a form appears, were you have to fill in the master data for the new user:

User ID: this is the login-name. You cant that change lather, so use ID's according your common rules, f.e. email, name.surname, nicknames and so on.
password: use something what is easy, the user can change that lather on his own.
photo: this can be changed from the user lather on too, never than less I recommend to do that, if possible. It helps the users to feel confident. The picture should be .jpg or .png format. It should be quadratic with at least 48*48 pixels, but it can be bigger. The small sizes just load up faster. If you use bigger pictures, the will be resized to the appropriate format automatically.
First name, surname: That should be the real names as long as you are not illegal criminals.
Email: please use the correct email address of the user.
Skills: that can be changed by the user too, usually you can fill in descriptions of the role or position, like f.e. "CEO and lightning idol" for me.

Well now you have described your first user. Hitting the button "create" will save that for future use. But hold on a second. First I recommend to send that person an email with his access dates: the web-address were to login (look at your browsers current address) , the login name and his password. (Yes, it's already part of our road map to do this automated soon.) And now, finally, don't forget to hit the button "create".

And now you just have to do that for all users you plan to invite to your team spaces.

1.2 Add all wanted Teams

A team is the space were related people work on a project or a global task. Possible teams may be:

departments, like Marketing, Finance, Human Resources ....
projects, like "desktop client development", "coke summer campaign" or "collecting oncology data"
global tasks (over different projects or departments), like "press wok" or "user reporting"

So you go to the teams section. On the right side you'll see 2 buttons: "new user", "new team". Hit the new team button and a form appears, were you have to fill in the master data for the new team:

Teamspace ID: That should be considered carefully, since you can't change that lather on. The teamspace ID is used to have understandable web-URL's. So avoid difficult and too long names here. Avoid special characters of your local font set. Just keep it simple and understandable, like "financial" for the financial department.
Teamspace name: That should be preferable the best describing name for your team. You can change that lather too.
Description: It's always helpful to add some words to the task and goal of the team. But you can change that lather too.

Now hit the button "create team" and you'll done. Repeat that for possible other teams. Every created team should appear in the left navigation bar of the team section.

1.3 Adding Members to Teams

So you go again to the teams section. Go to a team of your choice by clicking it in the left navigation bar. Now the team name appears in the headline of your current page. You'll see 2 new buttons: "Members" and "Edit". Hit the members button and a form appears, which has all possible members listed on the right side. just click to the "add members"-link in the peoples description and the people will be added to the current team. You added a wrong person? Don't worry, just hit the "remove" link in the persons description on the left team side, and it will go back to the peoples pool. When you adjusted all users to the current team, hit the save button to save your work.

And now do the same procedure for every other team. This part of the administration work can later be done by the team members itself.

1.4 Further Administration Tasks

Adding Teams and Team members will always be a task which can be done only by the administrator.

Well that's the stuff for today. Stay tuned for the next article about the basic principles of Mindquarry.

Mindquarry is not Mind Quarry and not MindQuarry

2007-07-12T09:08:51+00:00

Just a quick note for everyone googling for "Mind Quarry" and not finding "Mindquarry". We are called Mindquarry, as we find this is the easiest and most intuitive way of spelling our name. Some people are referring to Mindquarry as MindQuarry with a capital Q in the middle, which is not completely wrong, but we still prefer Mindquarry.

Mindquarry 1.1.2 is out

2007-07-11T15:27:54+00:00

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of Mindquarry Collaboration Server 1.1.2. This is a bugfix release for the stable Mindquarry 1.1 branch.

You can download release 1.1.2 now. It especially fixes a showstopper in 1.1.1 on windows.

http://releases.mindquarry.org/com/mindquarry/launcher/mindquarry-launcher/1.1.2/

The downloads page will be updated later today:

http://www.mindquarry.com/products/downloads

The release notes can be found here: Mindquarry 1.1.2 Release Notes.

For upgrading see:

Tell us about your Mindquarry usage scenario

2007-07-11T09:22:15+00:00

Do you use Mindquarry in your organization?
Do you intend to do so?
Did you install Mindquarry for someone else who is using it?

Please tell us here: http://www.mindquarry.com/node/add/customer-reference

Mindquarry workshop at the Hasso Plattner Institute

2007-07-06T14:52:28+00:00

SSL21484.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Today Mindquarry is (I'm first time live blogging :-) ) Lars holding a workshop about the modification and programming capabilities of the Mindquarry Collaboration Server. Behind Lars you see some dishes with pie to lure the students to the workshop. I guess, Lars will not release the desk until he finished his lecture. :D

First Mindquarry Screencast is Available

2007-07-06T12:52:49+00:00

Watch the feature highlights of Mindquarry online in the very first Mindquarry screencast.

geeks in action

2007-06-21T21:24:22+00:00

geeks in action
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

does such a picture needs any more a comment? Just 2 geeks in heaven ;-)

Ed Lyons

2007-06-21T19:29:04+00:00

Ed Lyons
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

is a collaboration consultant from Keane we met at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. He was familiar with open source and especially the apache cocoon project, he likes slim and easy to use software (in fact, when he was in duty to set up a Sharepoint server project with customers, he used 37signal's Basecamp to manage it ;-) ). He saw our software and got immediately hooked and he told 25 colleagues about it and was sure that they do so too. Next day we met him during breakfast, there I made that shot. I would be really happy, to get him deeper involved because I share his attitude towards non-bloated, easy to use software. That's what we are trying to do. And his feedback gave me trust that we are on the right way. I hope we'll never loose feedback that keeps us on that road.

Mindquarry presentation "How collaboration should look like" on slideshare

2007-06-20T18:39:44+00:00

The presentation I've held in the market leader track at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, "How collaboration should look like" (originally under the title "the business of collaboration") is uploaded to slideshare. Today we got selected as a featured presentation and therefore easy accessible upon the start page. Looks like we touched a hot topic. I you are interested have look and vote for us.

Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston

2007-06-18T19:49:10+00:00

SSL21337.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Today the conference started with some tutorial sessions. Since the demo pavilion opens not until tomorrow, Lars used the time to do what he's most liking: having his MacBook in use, coding, blogging, supporting ...

Tomorrow we'll have some appointments with analysts and bloggers, the demo pavilion opens and I have my presentation, so we will have less lonely pics up soon.

Mindquarry Collaboration Server 1.1

2007-06-14T12:47:53+00:00

So finally we made it to get the 1.1 version into a stable release. It has the new GUI, lots of features and it looks much less "childisch" like one of the testers of the 1.0 version was calling it. Read the press release for a overview.

I like especially the time line feature. It makes me feeling like the time traveler in Orson Wells "Time machine", putting my had on the lever and pulling it down to 1812... Ok, I just grab the time slider with my mouse and draw it back some days. But anyway, now I can go back and change earlier versions of my files and tasks, and it looks cool too. I often happens to me that I edit documents in different steps and the erlier versions are mostly more universal and a god basis for different variations of the document. For example I have a basic presentation and make often some special editions from it for special events or customers. It's easy now to go back to the primal version.

So if you try it, don't hesitate to give us your feedback, we're eager to hear from you.

Website down this morning

2007-06-04T14:32:57+00:00

Due to problems with the subnet of our internet provider, all our online services were down this morning for approximately 1 1/2 hour. Fortunately they discovered the problem quickly and all our services are back online.

Mindquarry Mac Client 1.1rc Released

2007-06-01T14:43:08+00:00

We released a new version of Mindquarry Mac Client which fixes a critical bug on our way to a stable release. The 1.1rc release is available for download.

You can try it out by downloading and installing Mindquarry Server yourself or by connecting the client to the online demo. Please let us know about bugs or feature requests.

Daniel, welcome to the Planet

2007-05-22T08:16:29+00:00

Today I added Daniel Naber's weblog to Planet Mindquarry. Daniel is working at Mindquarry since beginning of May and is currently improving Mindquarry's search and the desktop client for Windows and Linux users.

Red Herring Spring in Monterey

2007-05-08T09:00:55+00:00

SSL20932.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

we've attended the Red Herring Spring in Monterrey, which showed up with some impressive keynote speakers like Ray Lane from KPC, Pierre Lamond from Sequoia Capital or Salman Ullah, Director of Acquisitions from Google. (see pic) So we got some interesting opportunities in meeting people. My presentation went well, and the feedback I've got showed me that Mindquarry unlike other companies at the event brings a unique value to people like the even the listeners of my presentation: Getting teamwork done in a smoothly way and help people to do their job better by keeping them always up to date with the latest changes in the team files and tasks. People like what we are doing when they see how it works.
Anyway, the conference was pretty small in comparison with the Europe Red Herring event. It looks like Monterey is already to far away from the main Bay Area, were the most companies and VC's are located. Perhaps other events have been scheduled that time too.

Ten Bleeding-Edge Open Source Companies

2007-05-02T23:31:12+00:00

Once again we've been chosen to be nominated, that time as one of the top Ten Bleeding-Edge Open Source Companies.

We are very happy to get such attention. I think it's the result of our close work with our early adaptors, people who see the great potential and help us with their feedback. We are very grateful to you.

Meet me in Monterrey, CA

2007-04-23T10:36:43+00:00

Together with Mindquarry’s VP Marketing, Sandro Groganz, I’ll be attending Red Herring Spring in Monterey, CA. We’ll fly to LA April 30 and plan to be in Monterey May 1-3. It looks as if we’ll be in San Francisco a few hours during May 1st and definitely at May 4th. Back in LA May 5th to fly back.

If you’re around and would like to meet, drop me a line: stephan [dot] voigt [at] mindquarry [dot] com.

Barbecue @ Mindquarry

2007-04-21T19:21:36+00:00

SSL20823.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Last Friday we inaugurated our pation with the new barbecue. Alex (left) was barbecuing the burgers and chicken wings, Nadia (not on the photo) had some sticks with shrimps and Bastian (right) took care for quality control and the elimination of the beer. ;-)

outdoor working @ Mindquarry

2007-04-19T12:55:46+00:00

SSL20820.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Alexander Klimetschek is the first "outdoor worker" at Mindquarry, using the new patio and our IKEA garden furniture

Mindquarry in the Blogosphere

2007-04-19T10:06:58+00:00

We got a kind review: "The search for KB - Part III - Mindquarry" from "Jacks view on the world" , managed by Ionut Margelatu, a software engineer especially in the field of Java and J2EE. I really hope to see him as a contributor to the project soon.

Interesting to me is, that he seems to have a soft spot for good photos, especially at flickr. Our last two interns we found by their flickr photos too, perhasps there is a relation between good programming and a sense for art. ;-)

The black Red Herring award

2007-03-29T16:03:32+00:00

SSL20709.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Just to let you know what it looks like, I proudly present the holy piece. Our first one. Stay tuned for the next ones. ;-)

Breakout Session

2007-03-27T17:54:58+00:00

SSL20669.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

All of the Red Herring 100 Europe award winners got the chance for a 12 minute pitch. Mindquarry was placed into slot B and at half past 5 p.m. it was my turn to take the stage. I was in high spirits and that usually gives me wings.After the presentation we had a lot of interested people with lots of questions. Lars joined me gladly to help with the more technical matters.
When we finally left the room we had made contact with some interested VC's. Getting inquiries is always a honor for such a young startup like Mindquarry. So we (Lars and I) have been very satisfied with the evening.

Mindquarry in Cannes

2007-03-26T07:06:55+00:00

SSL20613.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Mindquarry arrived on time at the VME in Cannes. The photo shows Alex Vieux, CEO of Red Herring, opening the conference VME 2007 in Cannes by rewarding the Red Herring 100 European finalists. It's really a honor to be here among Europe's top challenging companies.

Mindquarry Webpage

2007-03-21T14:50:34+00:00

Sandro Groganz, our new VP Marketing, made serious complains about our web-CMS, Lenya. So he decided to switch to Drupal. Since today our web is running live on Drupal, but he is still working on it and anyone may watch him because he's doing permanently minor changes on the web site. Right now he changed the download button from poison green to a kind of army-green. Live is live....

News from the CTO

2007-03-21T14:06:33+00:00

I started a new blog which provides information about Mindquarry from the view of the CTO. In this blog I will write about Mindquarry's product platform strategy, roadmap, strategic partnerships ...

Please find my new blog at http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/saar/.

My personal blog about design and development at Mindquarry

2007-03-19T18:15:09+00:00

From now on, I will regularly blog about work on new releases here at Mindquarry on my own blog. This includes the (user-centered) design phase and technical aspects from the point of a lead developer. I'd be glad if you have a look at it!

Intern @ Mindquarrry

2007-03-14T15:48:47+00:00

This is one of our interns, Jonas. He is a freshmen student at the Hasso Plattner Institute and was a finalist at the German Federal Informatics Contest for younger students in 2005/06. He's a tall guy and makes me always look up, but he is really already a skilled and talented programmer. The shot of him was done by Jan:

Jan is our second intern, hes a freshmen student at the Hasso Plattner Institute too and he loves to mug us, mostly with Jonas' fat digital camera. Besides that he's a gifted and fast programmer and my development team is very lucky to have both in the team. His photo was made by Jonas.

For me, it's a very unique advantage to have our company located at the Hasso Plattner Technology Park, close to the Hasso Plattner Institute, which provides us those outstanding human capital. I hope we can provide Jan and Jonas a valuable learning time and a good team spirit during their intern to see them back again at the next opportunity. We are proud to have them among us.

Mindquarry is growing

2007-03-05T19:55:59+00:00

SSL20557.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Today we relocated to the new backyard building. We got 2 rooms there with space for 4 more people. And today in addition we got a new VP Marketing employee and 2 talented interns, Jan and Jonas. Both are students at the nearby HPI. It was impressive, how fast we were able to move. Since we have an outsourced server infrastructure, we just had to pick up our laptops and walk over to the new office rooms. The heaviest packing cases have been one for technical books, one for the paper files of the management, and then we had some crates of coke, water and juice. Thats all. Moving is still simple to us.

Sandro Groganz started his job at Mindquarry

2007-03-05T18:05:46+00:00

SSL20563.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan's Place.

Sandro Groganz, our new VP Marketing, arrived today at the Potsdam Train station. He will be staying here for a while to get a more in-depth look into the product and to get to know the team. We are happy to have him with us.

First Release - The Aftermath

2007-03-05T13:13:26+00:00

What an overwhelming reaction: After our first release last wednesday, the launch of the new Mindquarry Website and the start of the Mindquarry forum, we got thousands of hits on our website, hundreds of downloads and a lot of e-mail feedback. For me the most interesting point: most visitors came not via heise.de or golem.de, the german IT-news dinosaurs that covered our story, but via Stumbleupon.

I would like to say thank you to all bloggers that covered our release, especially

James Governor, to whom I got introduced by Marjolein Hoekstra, wrote about Knowledge Workers as Switchboard Operators
Linux Lookup mentioned our release
The alarmclock europe had an in-depth story about Mindquarry, our investor and our release
We got mentioned by Shutdownbutton

So, leaving aside our Roadmap for a moment, what are the features you would like to see in the next release of Mindquarry?

Analyzing Mindquarry at ohloh

2007-03-02T17:23:29+00:00

Analyzing sources, licenses and other issues is probably one of the most important issues that one may face when assessing a project. For providing more transparency and to simplify the assessment of the Mindquarry Collaboration Server, we added our project to the ohloh page. This page provides a service that analyzes open sources projects regarding activity and size of the development team, license compatibility, size in LOC and so on. You can find the results of their analyzes for Mindquarry here.

First Release and Download

2007-02-28T15:37:23+00:00

Finally we made it! Since today 15.59 CET the new Mindquarry website is public, along with the download of our first release and the accompanying community tools like development portal and forum. That was a hard work the last months, weeks, days and late night hours. I want to thank to all our employees for their enthusiastic and hard work: Alexander, Alexander, Bastian, Hagen, Lars and Nadia. Good job. :-)

A Wiki with Wiki Usage Tips (Wikipatterns)

2007-02-15T11:43:39+00:00

Wikipatterns.com is a website that contains common usage do's and don'ts for Wikis that are in a kind of programmer's jargon called Wiki Patterns. There are patterns for roles that people can take and how you can spur or hurt wiki adoption. (via Stewart Mader)

Announcing Planet Mindquarry

2007-02-15T11:36:38+00:00

Planet Mindquarry is an aggregation of weblogs of members of the Mindquarry Community. If you would like to be included in his aggregation, just send an e-mail to Lars Trieloff, I will add you to the blogroll. Planet Mindquarry is powered by the Venus software and uses a theme by LoadFoO, orginally found at Open Source Web Design.

New kid on the blog : Sandro Groganz

2007-02-14T12:03:46+00:00

Sandro Groganz has blogged it first on his page, that urged me to do it too. He will be the new guy in our company, as the VP Marketing he will be responsible for blogging more and betimes, for more and better information, for community work and all the regularly marketing stuff (of course) too. I met him first at the Open Source Business Forum this year in Nuremberg. He presented me himself as an open minded guy, combined with strong experiences in the open source & online market. He has a good sense for humor, he has hands-on attitudes and he's focused on his goals. So we see him perfect matching with our company culture and he's providing just the necessary knowledge for our current challenges.

So we welcome Sandro and we are happy to have him with us. You may expect more and faster progress from us next time.

The Downside of a sticky note todo list

2007-02-09T14:18:48+00:00

While a sticky note todo list (via Lifehacker) looks good, is easy to use and very haptic, there is one downside you can't deny: You cannot share it with remote team members. But this is a problem sticky note todo lists share with most todo list software - it is often hard to share information with your teammates.

Tagging in a Semantic Wiki

2007-02-08T10:08:30+00:00

Henry Story writes about the problems large organizations have with knowledge management (this applies to much smaller structures as well, especially when they partner with other teams), explains that PageRank-like algorithms do not work well in these environments and proposes a combination of Wiki and Tagging as a solution.

Wikis that allow a higher granularity of semantics than simply formatted texts are the ideal tool for collaborative knowledge management because some of the daunting wiki-gardening tasks can be outsourced to the Wiki software which allows ranking of important content, collecting links for a certain topic and suggests connections to other team members.

Using Mindquarry for Technical Documentation

2007-02-07T10:53:37+00:00

In my personal weblog I wrote a piece about My Methodolgy of writing Documentation with Wikis. Needless to say that this is the methodology we are using internally at Mindquarry for documenting the Mindquarry Collaboration Server.

I plan and organize the documentation project using an issue tracking system and create tasks for every step in the documentation process
I 'harvest' product development Wikis for information about the software I am documenting. This is the first use of Wikis - a source of information
I create a content outline of the planned document in the Wiki and invite other team members to comment and correct the content outline. The Wiki here is a space for distributed brain-storming.
I write the document using DocBook-XML, WYSIWYG-XML-editors and share the in-progress document and illustrations using a version control system. As I am using DocBook and Mindquarry's file sharing, concurrent editing of modular documents is easy.
Reviewers and copy-editor use the issue tracking system to create comments and remarks to the documentation.
After releasing the document, the issue tracking system is used to track comments and suggestions for improvements. As the Wiki keeps evolving I have a good starting point for a second revison of the document.

Also needless to say that the Wiki, issue tracking system for task management and file sharing server are all integrated in the Mindquarry Collaboration Server.

Wikis are web pages (editable)

2007-02-06T15:01:18+00:00

What is the distinctive feature about Wikis? Is it Wiki an online encyclopedia, a site that uses Wiki markup, or a website that is editable by everyone?

I think the main distinctive trait of Wikis is easy editing. Wikis are webpages that are easily editable. This poses a number of results:

Wikis are web-pages so they should be be accessed and edited via the Web. In Mindquarry is is possible using the Web-based Wiki editor, but you can as well update and create Wiki pages using standard HTTP methods like (PUT, GET, DELETE)
Wikis are easy to edit. This is a question of usability. When Wikis were first introduced, easy editing meant using Wiki markup instead of HTML, but with todays availability of web-based WYSIWYG-HTML-editors I agree with Adrian Sutton who says: "Need a Standard Wiki Syntax? Try HTML"

Consequently the Mindquarry Wiki offers easy HTML editing using a visual editor and cuts down the interface to the most important formatting options, as Wiki users want to communicate a message, collaborate and share ideas and do not want to spend much time thinking about fine-tuning the look of their pages.

Mindquarry at the Open Source Meets Business Congress in Nuremberg

2007-01-24T08:56:11+00:00

We arrived yesterday at the OSMB congress in Nuremberg, were we attend the Poster Session exhibition with a small booth. Yesterday we had some interesting meetings with users and investors and we still found some time to attend on some keynote speeches. The congress center is very new and exciting from it's architecture and interior. I've made some photos from Lars talking with customers and exhibitors and some impressions from the building as well. You'll be able so see them at the Mindquarry Photo Booth at flickr.

Open Source meets Business congress

2007-01-18T19:10:00+00:00

Howdy folks. You'll be able to meet me and Lars at the Open Source meets Business congress event in Nuremberg from February 23. to 25. 2007. Don't miss that opportunity to talk with us about collaboration and get a pre launch version of our software. You'll find us at the "Poster Session". We've been elected as one of 20 open source teams to present our ideas of a new generation collaboration software.

If you are there, vote for our poster! ;-)

PS.: read my blog note "SharePoint Server 2007 Is an (Able) Jack of All Trade - is he?" at my blog iqupi's world

Better Collaboration with IM

2007-01-08T09:32:06+00:00

In her blog "Web Worker Daily" Anne Zelenka claims "Why Instant Messaging is Better for Collaboration than Email". I'm not repeating her points, it's still a recommended reading. I agree in most points since email is just suffering from the point that it has some serious time delays between answers and that may result in some overlapping as well.

Finally she comes up with a kind of summary:

IM isn’t perfect. It can be abused, and it comes with its own complex undocumented etiquette and expectations. Email probably works better in some situations, like when you need to get agreement among a large group of people on a very complex topic. Or maybe you need a wiki for that.

I would like to add some remarks:

Traditional IM works for me not that perfect too, because It's always somehow boring, to wait for responses without seeing your opponent. I would prefer something like Skype with a web cam.
It is important, to keep some minutes for a longer time, preferable together with mail.
It might be helpful to store some ideas from an IM session straight into a wiki as a base for ideas and knowledge-sharing

With the Mindquarry Server I'll get it all in one. Can't wait for the release. ;-)