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GT: I’d like to start with a hot topic from our recent “BPM and Enterprise 2.0” Webinar Panel Discussion. While many businesses have adopted Wikis to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration, one critic said wikis increase the modality and complexity of a company’s communications and can result in undirected collaboration and a proliferation of unstructured data. How can this be avoided?

GT: Ok. Steve, do you have anything to add?

SB: I would resonate what Ken just said. Wikis enable anyone to have a voice inside the company and if that voice is not directed, it’s going to result in a cacophony. It’s going to be a lot of chaos if things are not organized. So there needs to be a common thread as to how the wiki’s used in the project or across projects. And that comes with any new tool that is introduced and I’m sure that was the story when e-mail first came in. In the end I think it boils down to this, the wikis for the index information is there; is it better that you can find information even though sometimes it seems to be not optimally organized? or would you rather have information not available at all to you? I think the answer’s privy to that.

GT: Right, I think we’re looking at a horizontal pattern of communication across a company now as opposed to vertical and it was funny you mentioned e-mail before because your product does integrate with Outlook e-mails, correct?

SB: Yes.

GT: So that would almost provide a built-in structure in some degree.

SB: Yes. E-mail is a fantastic tool. It’s here to stay. It’s gonna be complemented with other tools but even so it won’t be replaced anytime soon. Outlook is a place where a lot of really valuable information is being accumulated. And it’s simply sticking in people’s inboxes. And if its current for a few days that’s great but if its information that is current for longer periods of time, the inbox is just not a good place. Because then you have to track down the person who had the most recent version of that e-mail, what was the last status? You really want to be able to put that information that was kept in a thread into a central location that you can go back to in a couple of weeks or a couple of months and see what was the state of affairs or take it as an initial draft and refine it and polish it and make it meet your specifications for the project you’re working on. And so wiki’s done a perfect complement for e-mail when it’s already dominant in a corporation.

GT: So, you’re eliminating the multiple point-to-point model of project management?

GT: Right, and a much wider range of people can contribute also and expose their business intelligence to the rest of the company. I think a parallel might be the early assembly lines used by Japanese automakers where any worker can suggest an improvement or stop the line, although that might be an extreme example. Ken and Steve, we’ve been tracking MindTouch’s offerings for quite some time. Before Wikis, you unveiled the MindTouch Deki virtual solution. Can you describe some of its features that make it suited for enterprises? And also just explain to us what the word Deki means.

KL:: Right. Deki is a Japanese word for smart or intelligent. We thought that’s sort of a cute and appropriate name for what we’re doing and Wiki is Hawaiin for fast, so it suggests the spirit of the whole “Web 2.0” environment and what we have come to know as a wiki, which is a fast and intelligent way to collaborate and share. Deki is basically an enterprise wiki software, very cleverly implemented as a virtual appliance to the corporate Americans, and I will let Steve probably go a little bit further on virtual appliance if that’s required. As far as the features, it basically is a classic enterprise tool, where we start with WYSIWIG rich media editing feature. That’s very important because still there are a lot of people using open source software that just doesn’t cut it in the mainstream corporate world. 

Our basic premise is that we’ll make collaboration easy. First thing you have is what I’ve described, our interface, is essentially a lightweight word processor in a web browser. And everybody understands that, the icons are the same even. Everyone can recognize that, so there’s no learning curve, so that’s fundamental. I’ll just highlight a few of the top things. One, you mentioned, the Outlook connector, the other one’s of course, page permissions, where we can control the page permissions down to the page by person, by time, etc. You can invite people to view something and shut them off anytime you want. There’s versioning throughout, basically every change, every touch of a page by somebody is captured by time, by person, by subject matter. You can describe it. We keep the entire lifecycle of the document intact so anybody can go back to look at a version and it’s all captured. Then, of course, there’s all the sharing aspects of it, security based. So it really has all those attributes that make it a collaboration and a repository for people to share documents.

GT: Ok. Steve, would you like to add anything on a more technical front?

SB: Yes. Ken alluded to the packaging of the software. A wiki is kind of an interesting beast because on one side for the user experience everything is kept as simple as possible, the editing experience, the capabilities and so on, so that people can get their piece into the tool as quickly as possible. But actually on the back end, the wiki’s quite a complex little piece of software to make it all happen. And it includes basically the whole configuration of a Web server database, indexing search engine, and so on. So there are quite a few components that have to come together to make the wiki software work optimally. And so instead of giving individual IT people a long list of instructions about what other software they need to install so they can finally use our product, we decided to package it up as a virtual appliance.

Virtual appliances have gained a lot of attention over the past few years and are becoming more and more deployed in companies. What they enable an IT person to do, is to just download the software as a single file and it contains everything the operating system, the web server, the SQL database, the search indexing engine and by using VMware, which is the platform that we’ve built on. It takes nothing more than the double-click of the file to basically launch this entire environment on your server. You didn’t have to configure anything additional and there’s absolute zero risk of disruption to existing running software because there are no shared parts between the virtual appliance and your physical appliance. It’s a really easy way to get wiki-deployed inside the company, literally, in minutes that is state of the art. And if your needs grow, it’s as simple as moving the wiki appliance file to a beefier server when the time comes, which is very nice.

GT: I saw some descriptions that it actually fits on a USB key, can migrate between servers. You’re providing portability as well as scalability, literally.

SB: Yes, absolutely

GT: Right. Also, you’re minimizing the impact on the IT department and you have other products that do that also, correct?

GT: You’re correct Ken, if I can interrupt. One thing that came out of BPM In Action was that these processes are best adopted on a small scale with limited goals, and in this case wiki would fit right in.

GT: Ken can you give us a quick pricing model?

GT: How often do you anticipate issuing updates in the coming year to your software?

SB: Actually, we have been issuing updates quite regularly. Most recently actually the DST bug, the daytime savings time change that came upon us. We were able to update all the units in the field very easily. There are many components in the software that could have been affected by it, but again thanks to our remote update capabilities, nobody had to worry about it, it just got updated by itself. We issue regularly about once every few weeks minor fixes and then we also issue about two to three major feature upgrades a year and those are included in the license version of the software.

GT: Right. I’m understanding this. I’ve also noticed doing my research that Gilbane Group and our media partner, InfoWorld have bestowed some pretty good awards on your product.

GT: Right. Do you enjoy the usual benefit of open source software, that people have read extensively about your product, they’ve tested it, they’ve played with it, so that when they come to you they’re already in optimization mode rather than a lot of hand-holding?

GT: Moving from technology back to business, do you have any telling case studies of enhanced collaboration, communication, return on investment or agility?

GT: That’s a telling example both considering the importance of the client, and you had mentioned in your response to the first question where you would have to justify the wiki that the auditability was one of the key examples and that looks like that will be the early return and I think the other advantages is as you say, will come out over time.

GT: Right, you’ll see a spike in productivity as people do less searching and more thinking. Which in the end is what they’re paid to do. What are your plans, if any, for the wikis still made? Are you gonna try to make a virtual community pay? And do you think a strong presence in the consumer market can create up-sell possibilities to the small and medium business market?

KL:: Yeah, I think that’s our goal. At this point from a technology perspective, because we are so scalable and extensible we have produced the widest set of wiki solutions out there and we cover the gamut. But I think our focus really at this point is on the enterprise market for business, business-to-business. The consumer play we have just launched the wikis site out there, it is to build a community of users and proponents. And, yes, there’s some lead generations or possibilities from those users, but it’s one of those, if we have them, it’s gravy. We have a free version, which anybody can go to and in less than three minutes register, put in a couple keys of information and boom you have a wiki that’s posted as sort of basic features that a consumer would need. You don’t have a lot of the features that enterprise customers need. You just don’t need that. It looks very nice, very friendly. So this is really to cover the friends and family, to clubs and associations, educators from students to the researchers, and small businesses, if you like.

GT: From Little League to Ivy League, I guess?

GT: It sounds like a smaller scale model of your enterprise strategy also, that it integrates with a website, it shows benefit and then it will reverberate across other projects.

GT: Right, and for now the needs for business are driving development would you say?

GT: I am going to ask Steve two quick questions. One would be, in 25 words or less, you’re head of IT, how do you justify installing a wiki in the business? And the second one would be, what elements that Ken alluded to do you think wikis will contain five years from now? Will they be more like forums, blogs, mobblogs, anything like that?

SB: The first one is easy. At this point, in my mind, it’s how do you justify not having a wiki. They’re so simple to deploy; they’re so useful. Anybody who starts using it, virtually immediately says, “Wow, this makes such a huge difference.” And much to a large extent, Internet when deployed at the beginning in the late 90’s and which have gone stale because nobody could update them are a testament to how people knew having centralized information was useful but there were always gatekeepers to change that information. Wikis make it possible that everybody can contribute. Any responsible IT manager should be pushing the company to deploy these tools internally. It promotes communication, it promotes transparency, it, I think, is just a modern business tool that everybody needs. Where will wikis be in five years? Well, they can evolve in many different directions. I’m a big believer that you should use the tool that is best fit for a job, and I foresee that wikis, blogs, forums, everything will come together, but not necessarily because one platform will dominate everything, but because these pieces will work together well, and we’re already seeing glimpses of that today with mashups and web APIs that are emerging.

But every company should try to focus to build the best tools that they have set out to build. Our goal is to build the best possible wiki tool. And there’s so many ways that data once it’s inside the wiki can be found, through tagging, through searching be it by timeline, by individuals, by experts. It’s really an incredible data mine, and so I will think that wikis will continue to look a lot like what they are today, but the capabilities with regard to the information that it can put in, with videos, the richness of the everything experience and the ease with which you can retrieve information again out of the system, that’s where we’re going to see tremendous progress still, and that’s what’s gonna fuel much further adoption of the technology.

GT: I would like to thank you both again for taking time from a busy schedule to really give an illuminating presentation of both your particular product and a growing trend in the enterprise space and the personal space. Thank you.

GT: Where should our audience go for more information?

GT: Are there any special offers or anything going for users or adopters now?