MindTouch Unveils Wiki Virtual Appliance

MindTouch, a vendor of business wiki solutions, unveiled MindTouch Deki, which the company claims is the world’s first business wiki implemented as a virtual appliance. MindTouch Deki promises to give different workgroups in organizations the ability to share information and collaborate with colleagues almost instantly and securely on their own network.

According to the company, MindTouch Deki is a complete preinstalled, preconfigured application and operating system that runs on any Windows or Linux computer. Scalable from small workgroups to large enterprises, it runs atop VMplayer, a free virtual appliance player from VMware. It’s intended to reduce the time, expense and hassles associated with traditional enterprise software products that require dedicated IT staff for installation, configuration, support and maintenance throughout the ownership cycle.

The company also says that the appliance enables content portability, whereby users can move both the wiki application and its content from one computer to another, even to removable storage devices up to 100GB.

In addition to its promised ability to create, edit, share, search and store documents, e-mail messages, files and images securely behind a company’s firewall, the appliance includes a Microsoft Outlook Connector (to convert e-mail and attachments into wiki pages with one click) and XML page integration (permitting content to be integrated into existing Web services, knowledge management, Web publishing or any standards-based enterprise application).

MindTouch Deki is free for the first five users and is designed for on-demand scalability; customers purchase more user licenses online when they are ready, says the company. A full license (for five users) starts at $995.

—Esther Schindler

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