Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : .NET Development, Partnerships

DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex

Peter Galli — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:31:00 GMT

DotNetNuke Corporation, the creator of the industry-leading DotNetNuke development framework, has decided to leverage the CodePlex infrastructure for its core product distribution.

DotNetNuke will utilize CodePlex for download infrastructure, bandwidth, and metrics reporting for its core product offerings. Until now, DotNetNuke had been leveraging services from SourceForge.Net. DotNetNuke is also currently the second most commonly downloaded project on CodePlex.

Last February, DotNetNuke Corporation announced the availability of the DotNetNuke Forge, the prime destination for open source collaboration on the DotNetNuke platform. The DotNetNuke Forge has grown in breadth and popularity over the past year and now represents a vital part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem.

The DotNetNuke Corporation researched the many open source project hosting services available, and decided that CodePlex provided the "most reliable and dependable infrastructure, cleanest user experience, most advanced project administration tools, and highest commitment to future innovation," said Scott Willhite, its Co-Founder and Community Director.

CodePlex Program Manager Sara Ford says Microsoft is excited about having DotNetNuke join the CodePlex community and, as the leading open source web application framework for ASP.NET, the CodePlex team is looking forward to partnering with them to promote open source development on the Microsoft platform.

The team is also looking forward to hearing the feedback from the DotNetNuke community for improving the open source development experience on CodePlex.

Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows

jcannon — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:59:00 GMT

Our community knows that open source businesses are important to Microsoft. Nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that open source was a key theme in the recent Windows Server 2008 Launch. You can read more about that here.

One of the individuals we highlighted was Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO at Mindtouch. Mindtouch develops an open source collaboration platform. Today, I'm excited to have Robert Mason, Mindtouch Platform Engineer, update us on the progress Mindtouch has made in delivering a first class open source experience on Windows. Take it away Bob....

Short Demo Video: MindTouch Deki 8.05.2

This demo video goes through a lot of information quickly. It shows the basics of collaboration in MindTouch Deki and then demonstrates a mashup with a Microsoft Silverlight charting package. NOTE: With MindTouch Deki creating mashups, dynamic reports and dashboards does not require programming ability.

Hello! It’s great to be asked to guest blog here at Port 25. Last you had heard from us, we had written about MindTouch Deki from the start being written in C#, but running solely on Mono inside of a Linux environment. Well, that’s all about to change… I’m happy announce that for the first time, MindTouch is releasing an official Windows-based beta version of MindTouch Deki. Specifically, you may now install using a MindTouch-created Microsoft Windows MSI!

MindTouch Deki is an open source collective intelligence platform. In other words, it is an enterprise wiki that sits atop a web-services framework and enables mashups, dashboards, and dynamic reporting from disparate systems and databases. MindTouch Deki provides a unique collaboration tool for enterprises and workgroups. Rather than taking the less useful approach of other collaborative and Enterprise 2.0 applications by providing a simple walled-garden / point application, MindTouch has developed Deki with the collaborative intuition of a highly polished and robust enterprise wiki, but is also able to federate and mashup application and data silos. It was developed on Microsoft .NET using C#, and, until today, has only officially supported installations on Linux using Mono.

Although this is a beta release, the MindTouch team has worked hard to include all major features and functionality currently available to Deki users on Linux-based operating systems. Please report any problems or issues that you may discover either at our forums or by filing a bug. This new MindTouch Deki MSI beta supports IIS 7 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista only. However, the final release of the MSI will also support IIS 6 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Download the MindTouch Deki MSI today. We're very excited to at last be offering support for Microsoft IIS 6 and 7 on Vista, Windows Server 2003, and 2008. MindTouch Deki has enjoyed a groundswell of adoption with daily downloads in the thousands; by (finally) introducing an easy and officially supported means of installing on Windows Server and Windows Vista we are expecting great things! Now, Systems Integrators and .NET developers can return to their existing customer base (and find new customers) to deliver more value by "adding the 2.0" to the enterprise infrastructure in the form of a collaborative surface atop the existing infrastructure that they've already deployed.

Write MindTouch for more information about our web-oriented architecture or for a high level explanation read about our technologies at the website. Finally, expect to see more Microsoft-related updates from MindTouch in the coming months… Subscribe to our monthly eNewsletter at www.MindTouch.com to stay up to date on new Microsoft related products and offerings.

Thanks,
Bob Mason

MindTouch DekiWiki: open source, cross-platform wiki...

jcannon — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:41:00 GMT

For those who've been participating on Port 25 since the beginning, you may have noticed two recurring themes. One, Microsoft has a focus on generativity - or the ability for technology to be extensible to others, be they community or commercial developers. Windows, Office - the Live APIs - are all examples of the ability for technology to serve a purpose, and allow others to build new purposes simultaneously. The other is a focus on supporting and growing business partners. Over the past two years, we've talked to great partners like Centrify, BitRock, Quest and Mindtouch. In fact, the latter re-enforces the former.

Today is no different - we're glad to have Mindtouch return with a guest blog from Aaron Fulkerson, Mindtouch Co-Founder, with an update on their .net-based open source, cross-platform wiki solution. Take it away, Aaron.

Thanks for having us Jamie.

Since we last talked MindTouch has managed to propel itself into the pole position of our space. Specifically, MindTouch's Deki Wiki is the most popular commercially supported wiki there is. Our rate of adoption outpaces our most well-known competitor by a factor of 30x.Our software is currently being downloaded and installed more than 700 times a day and growing.

Why? How? Well, first of all, we've listened intently to our community of users and it has grown to an active and vibrant group of a couple thousand who have translated our application into 7 languages, filed bug reports, written code patches, and developed application extensions. They've also been very active in steering the product road map. Next, we've developed a compelling platform. The only platform in this space in fact. What I mean by "platform" is two fold. Deki Wiki has the most complete API. Deki Wiki's API has 99 REST-based methods and make it very easy to integrate the wiki or to build new applications, learn more here: http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki/API_Reference.

Point two, Deki Wiki has a web-service extension model that makes it the most extensible in this space. Finally, what's really set us apart from any other applications in this space is that MindTouch's Deki Wiki facilitates, even for non-technical users, the ability to create and share of application and content mashups. This will become clear in the demo video.

I should mention Deki Wiki is developed in C# on .NET and it is compatible with Mono. Extending it is language agnostic and it's platform independent thanks to the good folks working on Mono at Novell. Watch the demo video, I'm certain you'll be impressed with the power, usefulness, and uniqueness of what MindTouch is building. Then go download and install. It's free, open source, and thanks to the VMware certified image it can be installed in just over 5 minutes.

Check out the demo video ~

Thanks for having us Jamie and Port 25.

Mindtouch: Open source approach to Collaboration and Wiki's

MichaelF — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:01:00 GMT

On day two of OSCON we snuck into the vendor fair during setup time and spent some time with Mindtouch, a Microsoft partner looking at new ways to leverage Wiki's to enhance data sharing and collaboration. Interestingly, at the same time that we met them, Mindtouch was making some announcements (CNET, NYT) regarding their company and their Open Source solution: OpenGarden, built on Mindtouch Dream.

Jamie Cannon makes his first appearance on camera to conduct the interview with Aaron Fulkerson (Co-founder, COO) and Steve Bjorg (Co-founder, President and CTO) from the floor of OSCON wherein they discuss Mindtouch, wiki's and the start-up's recent announcements.

Video: Mindtouch: Open source approach to Collaboration and Wiki's

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