MindTouch Cloud is built on MindTouch 2009. It is a user-friendly business platform for business collaboration and automation. You can connect CRM, databases and services from Google, Yahoo! and others to automate reports, create content workflows to increase efficiency and effectiveness. MindTouch Cloud differs from MindTouch 2009 OnDemand because, unlike OnDemand, you do not have full access to the server for customization and you can not write custom PHP plugins or custom extensions. And of course, you can launch a MindTouch Cloud site in seconds for very little cost. Furthermore, MindTouch Cloud does deliver full access to DekiScript, control panel based skinning and includes full access to all enterprise extensions.

The price per user, per month is as low as $7. This provides the easiest way ever to launch a MindTouch site. MindTouch Cloud is a great solution for users that do not want to maintain on premise installations or for those who do not have control over the IT infrastructure and network settings at their company or organization. Now–in seconds–you can launch a MindTouch site, query data from CRM, ERP and databases to create rich, real-time reports in an easy to use collaborative environment.

Keynote & panel sessions included talks from executives leading companies such as ESPN, Technorati, Viget Labs, Microsoft, Emma, Goldman Sachs and my personal favorite, The Body Shop. From listening to the executives of these colossal companies, my take away can be boiled down into a Top 5 List of Internet Marketing Must Do’s for 2010.

1.) Simplify your Web Experience:

This seems like a pretty straight forward point, but it’s astounding how many companies have a hard time simplifying their website information architecture and experience. ESPN Senior VP of the Digital Media Group, John Kosner, had a philosophy to simplifying their web experience on ESPN. He followed 3 principles/goals:

1. Simplicity.
2. Easy to find.
3. Easy on the eyes.

These points might sound too obvious but I encourage you to take a look at your website and its paralleled experience. Does it exist as a living, breathing ecosystem? Does it cultivate new visitors into knowledgeable, intelligent beings through efficient architectural flow, valuable content all while preserving simplicity? And finally, not only are you listening but are you ASKING your customers about their experience?

John Kosner explained that after truly listening to their community and incorporating suggestions into their homepage redesign, ESPN.com revenues jumped 35% last year! Just by simply asking your customers and simplifying your web experience, you too could save your company millions of dollars a year.

2.) Establish KPIs TODAY:

We’ve all heard it before. What are your key performance indicators for this initiative? What’s your measurement for success? What are your expectations of outcomes on this project? These are questions that every company, department, work group needs to answer and define before starting any project. Yet, it’s still a key piece that many departments fail to define.

Determining your criteria for success before beginning a project is your Number One most crucial component. If you’re going into a project without defined key performance indicators, you’re making a huge mistake. KPIs are critical metrics that measure actual performance against predefined goals and objectives and help you to remain focused on the issues that really affect the organization. Define your KPIs for every project from here on out. For more information on how to define KPIs and what measurements for success are applicable for your company read here.

3.) Cloud, Cloud, Cloud:

Big topic at the Internet Summit this year – current CIO/CTO hurdles and the future of the cloud. I sat in on the CIO/CTO Roundtable where executives from 1800-Flowers, SAS, Univision Interactive and DoublePositive discussed their biggest obstacles in technology of 2009. They are as follows:

• Scale
• Timely reaction to data
• Immediate gratification
• Funding

The issues CIO/CTOs are facing in technology introduced talk of the cloud and their plans on leveraging it. Technology executives are drawing closer to the cloud because these types of offerings deliver both a cost benefit and an organizational benefit in scalability, speed of deployment and flexibility. A challenge for anybody who grows rapidly is integration. Concerns arise with so many sources of data coming from mobile, social media, enterprise systems, browsers, etc. and how to unify and bring them all together? Hmm have you ever heard of a company called, MindTouch?

For businesses looking to get into the Cloud, Which part of the cloud do you want to take? You can’t have it all, so where will you focus? Only focus on one thing that you’re really good at, and look to providers for the rest.

The members of the Roundtable stated that within 2-4 years we will see significant investments by Microsoft & Google into the cloud. This is definitely a hot topic and something every Internet marketer, Website architect and IT executive needs to keep in the forefront of their minds in the months and years to come.

4.) Blast Those Emails:

Thinking that email is a dying breed for marketing communication? Think again. According to panelists at Internet Summit 2009, email marketing is still the most commonly used and open platform. Generation Y claims that email is their #1 route of communication. With email still positioned as the most common form of communication Marketers need to look at email as the entry point and all of the social tools the movement. Here’s a metaphor: Email is the casting of a stone in a pond and social media are the ripples. No, I didn’t come up with that one.

The way to go about email communication is to determine who in your database is truly an influencer? Reach out to those influencers and share your social media tools appropriately. By leveraging your key influencers to contribute content, share advice and seek out additional community members, you’ll begin to see your communities organically and healthily grow. Remember before you do any of this, you need to plan and map out your sales and marketing processes. Plan your goals. Don’t think in terms of activities but think of longer term marketing strategy. Continuously nurture your communities and provide valuable content and resources, otherwise key influencer contributions will be wasted.

Did you know that email delivers $45.06 for every $1 spent? This is by far the highest ROI of any marketing channel but remember this is not a magic bullet. These ROI numbers are based on best practices and continuous testing. Follow these 3 email marketing best practices to get the most ROI out of your email marketing initiatives:

1. Be relevant
2. Think long term campaign strategy
3. Segment audiences and personalize

Update: Here’s a great resource on 10 Tips to a More Effective Email Marketing Campaign.

5.) Juice Up Your SEO:

What’s your SEO strategy? Is it just that side project that keeps getting blown off because “more important” tasks come up? Well think again. SEO is by far the MOST important marketing investment you can make…ever. Remember your website is your biggest asset so why neglect to tell the search engines about it? You cannot wait any longer to juice up your SEO. Yes, it will be an up-front investment of time and money but the long term benefits far surpass. SEO has proven to be one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing available. Just ask The Body Shop who focused on SEO in house for an entire year. By the time the next year came around, The Body Shop saw SEO traffic and sales (the kicker here) increase 30-40%! This can be your company! Consider how profitable you could be if your prospects found your website through keyword search over your competition. Why let your competition reap all of the traffic benefits from your lack of SEO? Today is the day you need to start your SEO strategy. Learn more about how to get started with SEO here.

Overall the Internet Summit was an informative, useful conference. I would, however, like to see more women participating in the panels. It always amazes me how many women attend but how few actually take part on stage. I would also like to see the conference span over 2 days. There was not enough time to go to each session, tour the demo pit and talk to sponsors all in one day. By and large Internet Summit 2009 was an insightful 11 hours and the participating panelists came from a high caliber of companies and experiences. These Top 5 points are not new but still applicable to your existing sales and marketing efforts. Here’s a question, if I were to make a list of Top 10 what would you add? Maybe I will do a follow up…

For an additional perspective, I recommend you read Ian Howell’s (Alfresco) earlier blog on US and European open source differences. 

First Law: Don’t treat Europe as one entity 

According to the European open source respondents, every country needs its own entry strategy.  One highlight in particular, you can get away with selling English versions of their product to Germany, Austria, Netherlands, and the Nordic countries (unless it’s a consumer oriented product).  Countries like Spain, France and Italy do require language localization of product and documentation.    We recommend you work with local Value Added Resellers (VAR’s) or System Integrators (SI) to help understand the local market and to help translate the documentation to save on the expense. 

Tip: Leverage your open source communities for localization support via an external knowledge base then reward them for it.

Second Law: Entry strategy through a VAR channel is essential

Thinking of entering Europe with a direct sales force?  According to our research the answer is a resounding no - don’t do it.  In Europe, local partners matter – they matter a lot.   Hire one local employee focused on European channel development and strategically select channel partners that understand your business model.  Don’t waste time with SI’s or VAR’s that don’t have either open source or industry experience (both is best). 

Tip: Mash-up your community user base with Google Maps to determine your concentration of customers, then recruit channel partners in the nearby areas. 

Third Law: Don’t do territory exclusivity contracts

Unless you have a strategic and financial reason to do so, avoid exclusivity of any type.  Respondents have shared stories about channel partner resistance to investing in marketing and sales activities.  Some simply wait for leads from you before taking any action.   Remember that a monopoly is never a good idea for business unless you’re the monopolist. 

Tip: Exceptions can be made for exclusivity tied to performance.  Tread carefully here however due to complex laws that vary by country. 

Fourth Law: Share your channel partner success stories

Quickly build channel partner references that are successfully generating revenue and advertise it within the European community.  Because of the 5th law below, you’ll need to convince most channel partners that your solution has the potential to create significant profit. 

Tip: Develop a business strategy for partners that clearly illustrates at least  a 1:7 € Euro ratio of your product/solution to their packaged offering (e.g. for every € Euro spent on your company’s solution, they can make 7 with a customer).

Fifth Law: Educate the European market about open source

According to our respondents only 10% of the corporate IT staff in continental Europe are buying open source products.  In Germany, France, and the UK the figure may be as high as 15% – 20%.  Shockingly, corporate IT staffs in Europe still prefer and trust Microsoft products over Linux.  Clearly, the need for additional open source evangelism in Europe is needed to educate European decision makers on the advantages of open source.  Plan on spending additional time marketing open source along side your product/solution. 

Tip: Work with other open source companies in country to promote the benefits of open source solutions. 

Sixth Law: Find niche and local markets without the big proprietary players

For higher European revenue returns, find niche geographic markets that your larger proprietary competitors can’t afford to operate in.  It’s too expensive for most large companies to operate in the tier 2 and tier 3 cities so setting up shop in these areas will pay off.  Become dominant in these areas to lock out the competition.  Remember Europe is still dominated by local players that need local support. 

Tip: Europeans are still not used to the idea of webinars and webcasts.  Having local channel partners that can demo onsite is a competitive advantage.

To better serve our customers, MindTouch will be expanding its support hours to 9am Eastern to 5pm Pacific. This change will take effect November 2nd 2009. MindTouch also has an updated SLA for our customers which details what is covered under our support levels. The SLA is posted on the MindTouch website.

If you have any questions about your support level or the updated SLA, please contact support.

There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry.  For instance, Steve Ballmer was voted in because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact.  Vivek Kundra was voted in because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government (in fact the Whitehouse.gov site was revamped with open source software).  Notably absent however are any influential women.

This list of the top influential Executives of the 2009 is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry.  Not all are recognizable, but these leaders are the movers, shakers and thought leaders of the open source industry.   Want to know the future direction of open source?  Just ask a few of the people on this list.

Honorable Mentions

Mentions

Tom Erickson, Sam Ramji, Brian Gentile, Steve Ballmer, Doug Levin, Greg Schott, John Powell, John Roberts, Jonathan Schwartz, Roger Burkhardt, Tim Yeaton, Vivek Kundra, Walt Johnson, Zack Urlocker, Aaron Fulkerson, John Lilly

The accomplishments and influence of these executives highlight the story of the most significant changes in open source this year.  We will continue to publish this “insiders” VIP list each year as part of our comprehensive analysis of open source best practices in sales and marketing.

Please comment on the list or let us know who is missing.

This week marks the official launch of the Mindtouch-Kaltura integration, and the topic of the day is Enteprise Video. Much ink has been shed on the growing use of video in the enterprise.  As companies look to cut costs & emissions, we’re seeing increasing use of live web meetings, eg0-casting, and video-powered marketing & communications. But what happens to these videos after the live meetings? How does the knowledge generated become an asset for future training, collaboration, support, or revenue generation? And what is the connector, the lifeblood, tying together the document-focused file management systems and desktop hard drives with these new fountains of rich media?

Enter… The Kaltura Mindtouch Extension. Two open source companies, one big vision. (see screenshots here)

What’s exciting about this extension is that it brings together Kaltura: a video platform that connects video applications across the enterprise and enables managmeent, organization, and delivery, with Mindtouch - a destination for enterprise collaboration.  The result is that no longer are internal and external collaborators stuck  solely with text.  Now enterprise users can communicate and collaborate with rich media.  They can upload and post video or audio from a desktop, webcam, the social web, or a company directory, make that video available for editing, and then share the results with others. Sounds, a bit high-minded, doesn’t it?  But now consider a few concrete applications:

- Have a library of training videos from lectures, screencasts, and news reports but don’t want to deal with an LMS,  central training team, or let the videos get lost on hard drives? Don’t want to deal with videos in multiple formats? Load the video into Kaltura & organize for public display at Mindtouch.

- Major software company wants to streamline its tech support and create a destination where users can help one another and read documentation.  Stuck with text only? No, not now… embed software training videos or screencaptures of common errors and bugs right into Mindtouch. And allow community members to upload their video contributions as well.

- Managing a team at work? Allow team members to record brief intro videos of themselves and create simple profiles on Mindtouch.  Build community, communication, and connection by letting people see and hear one another

We’re still in the early days of enterprise video.  But the Kaltura-Mindtouch Extension is sure to generate a whole new set of workflows and uses.  We’ll update you with new use cases and ideas here….

Before I dive into some of our findings, here is a simple return on investment (ROI) calculator developed from our customer research that will help you calculate the returns you can expect from deploying MindTouch. You should know I am using a 20% increase in efficiency (lower bound from customer research—see below). I have supplied the initial input for 100 users and an average employee salary of $45,000. Plug in your numbers and your ROI will calculate. I think the result will impress you.

I highlight the above ROI as “partial ROI” because this figure represents improved efficiency,  but does not cover improved effectiveness, which is difficult to measure. With the dashboards and reporting capabilities in MindTouch our customers are reporting improved effectiveness as well.

Early customers, such as Red Mountain Retail Group and Bill Me Later reported 25% to 40% increases in productivity. This translates to millions of dollars in savings for these companies. Recent surveys have reinforced these claims. Indeed, a statistically significant sampling of customers show an increase in productivity that is, on average, above 20%.

Justifications offered for increases in productivity include: finding and sharing information more efficiently, automating reports that previously were manually created, automated dashboards, achieving the same output with fewer human resources (a popular explanation—perhaps a sign of the economic times) and improved output from existing resources. Respondents quantified gains in terms of hours per week per user or by anecdotal percentage gains estimates based on the aforementioned justifications.

46% of customers report their businesses would stop (mission critical 20%) or be severely adversely impacted (highly valuable 26%) without MindTouch. Another 40% of respondents ranked it moderately valuable. This was assessed on a scale of 1 to 5, where ratings ranged from not valuable, mildly value, moderately valuable, highly valuable and mission critical.

88% of customer respondents use MindTouch constantly (42%) or frequently (46%). Another 12% of customer respondents use it sometimes (9%) or rarely (3%). This was assessed on a scale of 1 to 5, where ratings ranged from never, rarely, sometimes, frequently and constantly.

Of the customers that evaluated alternative enterprise collaboration platforms, the top competitors considered where Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, IBM Lotus and Open Text ECM Suite. In that order, with SharePoint, by far, taking the lead in competitive platforms considered.

There was a lot of valuable information gathered from our user and customer research. While it was overwhelmingly positive some of the most useful information was constructive feedback about places to improve; such as more comprehensive documentation. Thank you all for taking the time to participate.

Learn more how MindTouch is delivering value to our customers by reading the Forrester Wave: Collaboration Platforms report.

<digression>Register for Defrag with discount code “roebot1” for a $200 discount. The Defrag conference has yielded, at least, a 10:1 ROI for MindTouch every year for the last three years. </digression>.

Eric was using MindTouch and he had a couple questions. My email to Eric read as follows.

MindTouch 2009 is kind of like:

But with MindTouch 2009 even business guys can quickly, and I mean remarkably quickly, build something amazing: 

MindTouch does this by connecting and effectively upgrading enterprise and web:

Oh and MindTouch:

Attend Defrag. I’ll be speaking briefly. More importantly, while at Defrag you can connect with the bleeding edge of technology vendors, analysts, journalists and prospective customers.

Also, you should learn how MindTouch can help you cut the cost of doing business by 40%.

All three of these people (plus Dane, who makes four) are wonderful guys. Every one of them are the exceedingly rare kind of person that are genuinely a joy to be around them. Birds of a feather I suppose. I’ll note that Robert Scoble belongs in this same category.

Visit the FLOSS Weekly Episode 89 show page to stream the episode in a click. Feedback on my performance has been largely positive, but I wish we had more time to talk about topics other than MindTouch.

You may also subscribe to the show in your preferred podcast or RSS client from the show page. And you should subscribe to the show because it’s an awesome podcast. So is TWiT.

Be sure to encourage Leo to migrate the TWiT wiki to MindTouch. We’ll even do the migration for him. You can find Leo on Twitter (@leolaporte) or in IRC at irc://irc.twit.tv #twitlive.

Here’s Leo a couple years ago at Blog World Expo, which he will be attending again this week and which is also a conference I highly recommend.

I really enjoy podcasting. Participating in the creation of them and consuming them. Steve and Arne have a fantastic podcast on concurrency called: ‘Concurrent Podcast’. I encourage you to subscribe and listen to it. These guys are on the bleeding edge of engineering with respect to concurrency and distributed system architecture. Here is their schedule:

The latest major release, MindTouch 2009 SP1, is now available! This release, available as part of our Minneopa family of releases, can be retrieved from our downloads page.

This release contains lots of goodies -as a part of MindTouch’s Collaborative Knowledge Base launch, the Minneopa release contained the content moderation capabilities. This feature allows multiple users to collaborate on a draft copy of a live page, which is then vetted by a moderator before it is published back into the live version of the site. Find out more about the KB solution which contains this module.

The editor received some love from us during this release, with the addition of some more FCKeditor plug-ins which help support more advanced content features. We’ve added definition list support inside the editor through an additional plug-in, as well as more table editing support (sortable tables, one click table creation, and better table settings). Find out more about our editor updates.

In order to build the content moderation components, we added a new feature called revision hiding. This feature allows revisions to be “hidden” by an administrator, so they are not public. This helps suppress discovery of revisions which clearly have vandalized content. Administrators can go in and “unhide” revisions later as well. This feature is available anytime you view the history of a page.

The most significant architectural piece in this release is the addition of import/export. Import/export allows you to create packages of MindTouch content in hierarchies and import them across instances or within each instance. This API is available in both Core and commercial versions - accessing this feature is available through a command line tool (Core + commercial), while a UI implementation will soon be available in the Desktop Suite.

Integration with Kaltura video allows for the ability to collaborate around videos right in MindTouch! Sign-up for a Kaltura account through the control panel to enable this behavior - the Kaltura experience is launched by hitting the “video” icon in the editor.

You can find more information on our release notes page for MindTouch 2009 SP1 (Minneopa), or download it now!