So one of the exciting things happening at work lately is a concerted effort to talk more about the collaborative aspects of MindTouch without using the dreaded "social network" phrase.

MindTouch has always excelled at the "wiki" side of things - some of the bigger public clients that come to mind are Mozilla and WhoRunsGov - the former uses it for documentation, the latter as a wiki for political figures & parties. So when it comes to dealing with static content inside a wiki, we do very well. (Those sites use DekiScript, but its usage is more to augment the content.)

One of the biggest untapped strengths of MindTouch (which is nothing new, as the concept has been inside MindTouch for a while) is the ability to create a collaborative network with it. In more technical terms, it's the ability to take data from external sources and create dashboards of that information inside MindTouch, and then collaborate (comment, share, remix) around that data. High-level, I know. Let me break it down more specifically.

Even at a company like MindTouch, which is relatively small, each department has highly specialized views. A lot of these specialized tools do pretty decent reporting. I was surprised at Mantis' summary views (pretty nice!), and I know Salesforce has tons of reporting tools. Instead of out-doing the reporting for these apps, MindTouch is about bridging between these highly specialized towers to cross-pollinate data more. Even as a engineering guy, it is very helpful for me to connect with the PR calendar (timing releases) and to understand how sales are doing at a broad level - eventually I can see the buy triggers for our customers, and be able to report back to the engineering team on how they contributed to sales (it's hard without metrics - I know Amazon actually breaks down exactly how much revenue each feature contibutes!).

It's not about replacing your current toolsets, but augmenting them by culling specific data points relevant to different teams and displaying lightweight reports around them.