GSFC is one of two paying MindTouch customers within NASA, the other is at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s exciting that MindTouch is playing a small role in space exploration.

The latest survey we conducted, Technical Communication and Documentation Survey, was a best practices survey to the technical documentation community. We had several hundred responses - thank you to all for your participation! Out of those, we had three lucky winners of the Amazon Kindles that were up for grabs for completing the survey. From the random selection MindTouch is happy to announce that Jack Kennedy from Skyway Software, Mary Myers from Sungard, and Lee Rosenthal from Apartments.com are the winners of the Amazon Kindles! Congratulations all!

Here’s what each had to say about winning their Amazon Kindle:

Jack Kennedy

Skyway Software

“I am excited to see such a strong open source, web based collaboration offering from MindTouch. It’s built in integration with Windows Live, Google, and Amazon look to be compelling out-of-the-box capabilities. Thank you for the Amazon Kindle!”

Mary Myers
Sungard

“I am constantly looking at ways to improve the training & learning process with up-to-date technology. Which is why I was looking at MindTouch. I am so excited to have won the Kindle, thank you MindTouch.”

In This Issue

• Letter from the CEO: Get a Free Fujitsu Scanner from MindTouch
• New Product Announcement: MindTouch Charts is Now Integrated With MindTouch Initiative Management
• Enterprise Software Open Source Alternatives – A Decision Makers Guide

A Letter From the CEO: Get a Free Fujitsu Scanner from MindTouch

This month MindTouch announced an innovative partnership with Fujitsu that promises to have significant positive impact on business productivity. I’m proud to inform you that Fujitsu integrated MindTouch with their new line of ScanSnap scanners. ScanSnap users can scan paper documents directly to MindTouch. Here’s the best part: MindTouch indexes the files for searching. In short, you now have an affordable solution for Searchable Document Archiving and Collaboration. Previously, these types of solutions required cumbersome client/server applications, months to deploy and mid six-figure investments. With MindTouch and Fujitsu, installing is easy! You can be up and running in a day with pricing as low as $7 a user per month.

With this solution you can now:

• Upload content directly to your MindTouch collaboration sites with the press of a button.
• Manage read/write access to new document pages to comply with internal governance and compliance requirements.
• Search the contents of all files.

All of this combined with our award winning web based collaboration platform.

To celebrate this newly minted partnership, Fujitsu and MindTouch want to give you a FREE ScanSnap scanner. Through the end of June you will receive a free ScanSnap with purchase of selected MindTouch 2009 licenses. This includes MindTouch 50 user licenses and MindTouch Cloud (you must pre-pay three months of MindTouch Cloud for eligibility).

Free ScanSnap with MindTouch Cloud (hosted)

Free ScanSnap with MindTouch 2009 (on premise)

New Product Announcement: MindTouch Charts is Now Integrated With MindTouch Initiative Management

Lately, we’ve seen a surge in demand for our Initiative Management Module (IMM). Many of the organizations I speak with are struggling with how to initiate and manage new initiatives. Too often, they lack a central location for employees to collaborate on ideas.

To expand the breadth of our IMM solution, we’ve now added MindTouch Charts – our newest offering. MindTouch Charts is a robust charting solution for dashboards, reports and analytics. The result of this new integration is a powerful initiative management solution, with unsurpassed data visualization capabilities - bringing corporate initiatives to life!

As a sneak peek to our newsletter subscribers, MindTouch is offering these two solutions as a bundle at a 40% discount.

MindTouch Initiative Management Module, with MindTouch Charts - 40% off

Enterprise Software Open Source Alternatives – A Decision Makers Guide

The Open Source vs. Proprietary competitive landscape is constantly changing and current information is often hard to come by. We decided to create this matrix for those looking for an open source alternative to proprietary solutions.

So to try and help, we have looked at search data from Google which produced some surprising results.

Read What Open Source Alternatives Came Out on Top

Well, almost a year later and countless customer conversations later, I now know that:

1. Countless hours are wasted looking for hard copy documents
2. My friend was on to something
3. If it’s printed on paper, you’ve pretty much lost that information forever

This is why I am particularly pleased with MindTouch’s latest partnership with Fujitsu.

ScanSnap users can now scan paper documents directly to MindTouch. Then, MindTouch indexes the files for easy search. Hence you can eliminate your ‘dumb’ storage rooms and documents stuck in anonymous file cabinets.

Worried about exposing confidential information?  With MindTouch governance, you can still control who has access to the documents. 

We’ve also made it easy to install.  You can be up and running in a day with pricing as low as $7 a user per month.  And it’s priced per license, per month- so even small businesses can take advantage of the offer.

With this solution you can now:

• Upload content directly to your MindTouch collaboration sites with the press of a button.
• Manage read/write access to new document pages to comply with internal governance and compliance requirements.
• Search the contents of all files.

All of this combined with our award winning web based collaboration platform.

Documents in the cloud – free your knowledge. One step closer to the paperless office.

To celebrate this newly minted partnership, Fujitsu and MindTouch want to give you a FREE ScanSnap scanner. Through the end of June you will receive a free ScanSnap with purchase of selected MindTouch 2009 licenses. This includes MindTouch 50 user licenses and MindTouch Cloud (you must pre-pay three months of MindTouch Cloud for eligibility).

Effective immediately, MindTouch has updated our customer care offerings. With our many years of supporting innovative companies with their collaboration projects, we’ve developed new engagement options to allow you to do more, faster, with your MindTouch deployment. Whether you’re looking for 24×7 support, one–on-one screen sharing sessions or real-time support chat, we have the plan for you.

Highlights of Our New Offerings

• Simplified Support Ticket Allotments – we’ve combined the previously separate Development and Systems Administration ticket allotments into MindTouch Expert Tickets (METs), which can be used across multiple use cases. Existing tickets will carry over to this new model, and you can also purchase additional METs as needed.
• Expanded Interaction Methods – depending on your support needs you can take advantage of our new interactive support offerings, including real-time chat, call-back phone support and phone support provided by a dedicated MindTouch Customer Care rep.
• Add-ons Available As Needed – Gold, Platinum and Enterprise support customers can now purchase additional support modules, such as 24×7 ticket support, MindTouch Expert Ticket (MET) packs, allowing customers to add more tickets to their existing accounts, and Training packages on a wide range of MindTouch topics.

If you have any questions about the changes or how you can upgrade your support agreement, please contact sales.

So to try and help, we have looked at search data from Google which produced some surprising results.

Our Methodology to Determine Popularity

We used a number of tools from Google to determine popularity of the products around the world. For instance, the search volume methodology uses a scale and is based on the average worldwide traffic of the product in the last 12 months. It is also relative to the comparison product.

Regarding country popularity, if a high proportion of the searches in a country are for the product term, then this indicates the search term has a high degree of popularity in this country relative to the other countries.

The Proprietary Versus Open Source Matrix

A reminder that when we say “popular” here, we mean how popular the search term is.

Also remember the results are normalized, so the size of each region is not a factor. Everything is in proportion to the size of the region. So larger regions are not favored over small, as would be the case otherwise.

Automated Lifecycle Management

Both Collabnet and Visual Studio Team rank high in India and the United States. Visual Studio Team has almost 4 times the global search traffic of Collabnet, but Collabnet is catching up.

Enterprise Resource Planning (Medium company)

Microsoft Dynamics has almost twice the traffic of Compiere, but has stabilized. Surprisingly, South Africa heads up the Dynamics search traffic (relatively speaking).

<Click to enlarge>

ERP/Accounting (Small Company)

In this category, we are looking at small companies under $10 million in revenue. Quickbooks has far more search volume than its open source competitors but Open ERP has recently made some moves towards closing the gap. I was surprised to see Kenya top the country search list for Quickbooks.

<Click to enlarge>

Content Management System

Drupal rules the search area here with nearly 4 times that of DotNetNuke. Still, both open source companies have much stronger search volume than their OpenText competitor.

<Click to enlarge>

Master Data Integration (MDM)

While Tibco has higher search volume, Talend has been steadily closing the gap since 2007.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM is hot! But most surprisingly, SugarCRM search volume is slightly greater than Salesforce.com.

Enterprise Database

The big surprise here is that PostgreSQL has higher global search volume than Oracle Database (almost a 3 to 1):

Business Intelligence

Considering all the recent press around Jaspersoft, I was surprise Business Objects has much greater search volume than Jaspersoft. Business Objects and Cognos have almost equal global search volume.

Pentaho and Jaspersoft have almost equal search volume. Both appear to be gaining on their proprietary rivals.

Enterprise eMail Management

Another surprise Zimbra has higher search volume than Microsoft Exchange. Zimbra’s search volume is understandable considering it is open source, but it doesn’t explain it’s commanding lead over Exchange.

Business Application Platform

While Sharepoint 2010 is an unreleased product, plenty of buzz has been generated around this forthcoming product.

Document Management Solution (DMS)

Apparently India and Singapore are the big search winners in DMS.

IT Monitoring and Network Management

Groundwork has IBM Tivoli beat slightly by search volume. All of the companies are fairly close though. Regarding IBM, Denmark is proportionally stronger than any other country?

MindTouch recently identified a security issue that, under certain server configurations, could cause administrative credentials to be disclosed. Our engineering team has confirmed the issue and released a hotfix to remediate this issue for all versions supported by MindTouch. We have also issued an incremental release (9.08.3) which contains this security patch. If you are running an older version of MindTouch, we have also provided patch files if you feel a major upgrade is too risky. Detailed instructions on how to patch your systems can be found here.

It is imperative that you update your MindTouch installs immediately. We urge you to take a proactive approach in applying this patch, which should take no longer than ten minutes.

MindTouch places a great emphasis on the security of the platform, and will continue to improve on our release processes to diminish the likelihood of these types of issues.

For our OnDemand and Cloud customers, your sites were upgraded during the emergency maintenance window last week, and you need to take no further action.

• Web developer (a webmaster, I loathe the term, but it’s fitting). Does effecting the behavior of millions of visitors excite you? Can you hack together systems for the sales and marketing team (MindTouch software makes it pretty easy)? Do you have stellar webdev and basic UX/UI skills? This is all you. 
• Business analyst. This is a hard core data monkey that loves pouring over numbers. If you love data and analytics you will <3 working at MindTouch because everything we do is data driven. Test and measure, test and measure. Come help us. 
• Technical trainer. Assist partners and customers ramp up development on MindTouch. Lay the foundation for self-paced training and technical documentation. This is more a customer/partner facing technical role than it is a documenter role, but you will be creating documentation.
• Account manager. 20% of MindTouch customers double their spending within the first 12 months and over 80% of MindTouch customers renew. These are impressive statistics for a company that currently has no formal account management resources or process. Help define the team and process while learning why MindTouch users and customers love our software. 
• Product manager. Define and drive product specifications based on user, customer, partner and market inputs.
• Tier 2 customer support.
• Product marketing.
• Channel marketing.
• Channel sales.
• Technical documentation lead.
• User experience designer.
• Platform evangelist.
• Software developer engineers.

This is not all the positions we are hiring for, but these positions are top of mind. If you love your work please consider contacting us, but please include a cover letter, resume and some mention of why you are a good fit and would like to work with us at MindTouch. 

RoyK recently shot some photos of our current office in anticipation of our imminent move to our new and improved offices. If you’re considering employment at MindTouch I thought it would be interesting to see some of the faces you would be working with.

Tim O’Brien is a MindTouch sales representative. Indeed, Tim is the highest earning MindTouch sales representative. He was one of the very first sales hires and has been with the company for 1.5 years. In this photo Tim is on a call with a customer. This customer generates more than $4.5B in annual revenue. We have an exciting project underway. Stay tuned.

Pete Erickson was a MindTouch contractor before we had any employees. The guy is brilliant. He was at Great Plains before the Microsoft acquisition. Microsoft recognized his talent and made him a crisis ‘firefighter’ of sorts. When I met him he was the CTO for a fiber to the home startup. It’s a joy to work with and to know Pete. Unfortunately, he still lives in Minnesota and I don’t get to see him much, but he is omnipresent at MindTouch.

Max Mass is another of the many brilliant members of MindTouch engineering. He started with MindTouch 3.5 years ago. It was only earlier this week that I realized it’s been that long. It seems like yesterday. I interviewed him over the phone from an airport, the Minneapolis airport if I recall correctly. I remember giggling during the interview while I addressed him by his full name: Maxim Mass. Say it aloud.

Corey Ganser is the gentleman on the left and GuerricS is on the right. Corey has performed the following roles at MindTouch: office admin, trainer, sales and support manager; in that order. He has been a MindToucher since the first year of business. Corey is the reason our customers consistently rank MindTouch support 4.75 out of 5 every month, quarter and year. Guerric is responsible for a lot of the user interface at MindTouch. He’s a real engineer from Urbana-Champagne (he couldn’t get into UNC ;-).

Damien Howley is the technical lead for the professional services team at MindTouch. He’s been with us for three years and started as the webmaster. There were fewer than ten of us at MindTouch when Damien started. In 2009 MindTouch professional services increased by 36%. This year It was19% of our total revenue. I intend to keep it there.

Sarah Carr is the marketing coordinator at MindTouch. She’s been with us for almost a year.

Roy Kim is a fellow UNC alum. He is also the first employee of MindTouch and our VP of Engineering and the photographer of most of these photos. Roy started college at 16 and graduated four years later with a degree in Economics and Chemistry while simultaneously launching a popular blogging/social site that has only suffered from his investment in MindTouch over the last five years.

MindTouch is a great place to work. In fact, it is ranked one of the best places in San Diego by the San Diego Business Journal. Our pay is competitive. The benefits are superlative. There are many miscellaneous perks including catered (free) lunches, free snacks and $600 a quarter per employee for personal development. Most importantly, employees receive equity in the company and MindTouch is growing exponentially. If you want a deeper understanding of what it is like to work at MindTouch read the recent post at my personal blog titled: “Four keys to success”.

Please apply if you are ambitious, brilliant, and hard working. I would love to work with you.

But first a short quiz.  Do you think Larry believes;

A.   Enterprise 2.0 is redefining Enterprise Software and will become as common place as email. 

B. Enterprise 2.0 is overhyped and he prescribes to the Dennis Howlett school of thought of “It’s all Bullocks”.

C.  Open Source software will help spur Enterprise 2.0 adoption and lower licensing costs.

To learn the answer, follow along as we ask Larry some of the same questions our customers are asking us.   For the skimmers, please scroll to the bottom. 

How important are the analytics behind Enterprise 2.0 tools? In other words, is it important to inventory worker skills and collaboration patterns to help find internal subject matter experts? Or to optimize worker productivity by analyzing informal networks? Or to measure, rank and rate employees based on the net dollar value they are providing the organization?

The ability to log and analyze system transactions is an important component of any enterprise system, and that fact has not been lost on vendors or deployers of enterprise social software. Most enterprise social software vendors now include activity logging and reporting capabilities in their products or services.

Some applications of analytics are highly visible, such as usage statistics reports that help site owners and community managers make informed operational decisions. Enterprise social software usage statistics could be used to rank and rate employees based on their contribution to the organization, but the metrics would most likely be stated in terms of quantity and quality of information and knowledge shared, rather than in hard currency amounts.

Other analytics applications are, ideally, invisible to the people using the system. For example, enterprise social software should leverage transactional data to automatically recommend relevant content and subject matter experts to someone using the system, saving them the time and effort expended in manually searching for those resources. Analytics can be used to determine and generate visualizations of an individual’s social graph, and to recommend people in their network who can introduce them to a potentially valuable new contact. These systematic, invisible uses of social transactional data are currently less common than their visible cousins, but they have the potential to produce greater value.

What in your opinion is the “killer app” that will be the catalyst for mass Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption?

Wikis and blogs have been the most widely adopted E2.0 tools to date, but neither has made enough of an impact on business in terms of mass adoption or value creation to be called a killer application. Micro-sharing (or micro-blogging or status updates) has the potential to be a significant value driver for organizations, because it combines attributes of communication, presence, and location technologies in a simple, yet flexible user experience. Micro-sharing is a relatively new tool in the E2.0 toolkit, and we don’t have enough solid data about its impact on organizations yet to crown it the killer application, but micro-sharing seems to have the highest potential to positively effect mass adoption.

What if anything will open source software contribute to Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption?

Open source software should increase social software adoption because of its propensity to spur innovation, lower licensing costs, and make it relatively easy to integrate social functionality into other enterprise applications. Community source software effectively crowdsources some or all of its feature development, leading to a faster rate of innovation compared to proprietary software vendors. Organizations are more likely to adopt a specific product or service when they can directly influence its functionality roadmap. The lower licensing costs of open source social software, as compared to proprietary offerings, makes it easier for organizations to deploy to larger numbers of people.

Finally, the Web and service-oriented architectures of most open source software means that it can be more easily integrated with, and into, existing enterprise applications and new mashups. Integrating social functionality into the environment in which people currently work is one of the best ways to spur adoption.

There have been many heated discussions between Enterprise 2.0 advocates and those that believe Enterprise 2.0 is a crock.  What is your position on the matter?

This should not be an either/or debate, as I said in a post on my blog entitled "Enterprise 2.0 is Neither a Crock Nor the Entire Solution".  In that post (and others which are referred to therein), I opined that E2.0 philosophy and technologies are complementary to traditional management techniques and enterprise systems. Large organizations need both structure and free-form collaboration to identify and act on business opportunities, and to best operational challenges. Overemphasis on one at the expense of the other will limit value creation within a large enterprise.

What should Enterprise 2.0 software vendors be doing to help their customers successfully adopt their offerings?

Enterprise social software vendors should proactively assist their customers from the pre-implementation planning phase to actual go-live over the course of multiple projects. Several vendors have staff with titles such as Social Software Advisor or Customer Success Manager, who are assigned to new customers and are partially responsible for the success of the customer’s social software initiatives. Other vendors prefer to partner with professional services firms to provide implementation strategy and execution services to their customers. Either way, it is in the vendors’ best interest to assist their customers and improve the likelihood that they will purchase additional software licenses.

What does the future hold for Enterprise 2.0, and which companies will participate in defining it?

Great question; I’d be very rich if I had the answer! But I’m not going to pretend to have "the" answer, because I don’t think anyone does. I can only make predictions based on past involvement with other management disciplines and related software market categories.
From a management perspective, it seems like the reaction to E2.0 has been similar to the reception given by most organizations to Knowledge Management. Organization leaders think it sounds good and interesting, but end up saying "where’s the beef", because they can’t attribute value creation that is quantifiable in terms of hard currency to the discipline. A relatively small number of enterprises will understand how and why E2.0 can help them, and succeed in making it part of their organizational fabric; the rest will experiment half-heartedly with E2.0 and watch their initiatives fail.

As for the technology, there is a high probability that the Enterprise Social Software market’s evolution will mirror that of the Enterprise Portal market nearly a decade ago (see his blog post on this subject). The Portal market experienced four years of strong growth and then consolidated rapidly, leaving only a handful of computing platform vendors with viable enterprise portal software offerings. Much of the portal technology base was subsumed in other categories of enterprise software, and the vendors that were not acquired died a slow, cash-starved death.

I have seen many indications that there will be a repeat of this evolution pattern in the Enterprise Social Software market, which is still growing at this point. However, there is one big difference this time around — the presence of vendors operating under open source development and licensing models. They may be able to compete with the proprietary computing platform vendors over the long haul, while most of the pure-play collaboration suite vendors will not.

Larry is speaking at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston.  That is if you vote for him.  Here is the quick process:

Step 1.

Register a user account. (two clicks away—assuming you use the tab key You must do this before proceeding to the next steps.

Step 2.

Vote for Larry’s session below by simply clicking the URL (you MUST be registered and login for the single-click vote to work—don’t skip step 1)

Emergent Adoption: Twitter’s Development as a Model for Adoption of Enterprise Social Software

While you’re there vote for the author’s sessions:

Step 1.

Register a user account. (two clicks away—assuming you use the tab key You must do this before proceeding to the next steps.

Step 2.

Vote for each of the sessions below by simply clicking the URL (you MUST be registered and login for the single-click vote to work—don’t skip step 1)

Step 3.

Register and attend the conference. If you’re attending and you voted for our sessions I’ll buy you a glass of wine. I’m told bribing people with addictive substances is pretty effective.

For those who haven’t attended before, E2.0 has a lot to offer in the way of education, networking and trending. The community has historically been pretty tight-knit. Hopefully with your help we can infect the E2.0 Elite with our real-world experiences and customer stories. While I’m on the topic of real-world experiences and customer stories, I encourage all readers to submit their own sessions or to share their stories with us. Do you have an interesting MindTouch story you’re willing to share? Email a few sentences to SarahC at MindTouch.com.

Thanks for your help and happy 2010!