Social Glass

A recent press release from businesswire.com highlights Mindtouch’s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger). Mindtouch creates a product called Deki Wiki, an open source wiki and community platform. They make money by selling enterprise support subscriptions, a model that is increasing in popularity.

According to the press release, Mindtouch has seen a 100% increase in active installations (200,000 in total) since last year, and is being used by major organizations including FedEx, Microsoft, and EMC (made famous by Chuck Hollis who chronicled EMC’s adoption of Clearspace).

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Aaron Fulkerson is a pretty switched on guy, so I’m expecting Mindtouch to have more and more of an impact on the Enterprise 2.0 market as each quarter passes.

I recently had the chance to talk with Yonni Harif, Marketing Manager, and David Lavenda, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for WorkLight on the topic of security and Enterprise 2.0. WorkLight fundamentally believes that consumer Web 2.0 applications will play a vital role in Enterprise 2.0. Knowledge workers will use iGoogle, Netvibes and Facebook to help them with their jobs whether their employer likes it or not. David noted that an estimated 86% of employees use Internet-based tools for productivity purposes. Smart companies will embrace consumer tools and make them even more beneficial for their workers.

WorkLight is a two year old business that set out to consumerize IT. They’ve been quoted in Computer Weekly and ITWire and have recently formed Secure Enterprise 2.0 forum.  The forum “is comprised of top executives at Global Fortune 500 companies that are ready to address the security challenges posed by Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, RSS, widgets and gadgets, personalized homepages, social networks and social bookmarking, which are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise.”

They have a server (also called WorkLight) that connects with line of business applications on the corporate intranet. It then dishes out information from them securely in a variety of formats including RSS and Google Gadgets. This means that an employee can use iGoogle to interface to his company’s SAP system, for example.

How is this secure?

Companies are naturally hesitant to expose data from core systems, especially if that data is going to be used on Internet-based applications. But WorkLight’s offering is unique. Users are asked to authenticate before using a WorkLight service or widget. Data is encrypted using SSL and/or is transported over a VPN connection to the corporate intranet. Moreover, the WorkLight server integrates to a company’s directory service (LDAP, Active Directory) and uses already-established security protocols to determine who has access to what.

WorkLight also believes that Facebook can be used in creative ways when it comes to corporate intranet. Yonni Harif observed that companies that embrace Facebook for business purposes have instant leverage on their employee’s Social Graphs. WorkLight creates a Facebook application called Workbook which is designed to integrate corporate information systems into Facebook, securely. Andrew McAfee saw a demo of this in action and wrote about it here.

I asked David how they approach a typical engagement given that some systems integration would be required to connect line of business applications to WorkLight. David said they have some out of the box adapters for systems like SAP, but that if they have to build a custom adapter they do so using the “read mostly” approach. The premise behind “read mostly” is that it’s easier to pull data (read) from line of business applications than it is to push it (create, update). As such Worklight tries to minimize the amount of data that goes back into these systems through their widgets and services, and this reduces the costs their clients incur when hooking their systems into WorkLight.

Once a widget or service is created on the WorkLight server, users can rate or write comments about them. Rating and download count then influence the visibility of the widget or service on the server where those that are highly rated and downloaded often appear on the front page.

Security and Risk Management are a Big Deal

Lets face it, a lot of the guys we’re selling Enterprise 2.0 to have been in business for a while. This means we need to appeal to their natural tendency to stop initiatives they don’t understand because they’re deemed too risky. Companies like Techrigy and WorkLight are building solutions designed to make Enterprise 2.0 more secure and less risky (disclosure: I’m working with Aaron Newman, President of Techrigy, on a side project). As the market matures we’ll see security play more of a vital role in any Enteprise 2.0 solution stack.

Update: Deki Wiki has had mashup capabilities since June/July 2007. The Dapper extension is new to release 1.8.3.

Read/Write web has just posted about some awesome new features in Mindtouch’s new release of Deki Wiki, version 1.8.3 (disclosure: I am working with Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch on a side project). Deki Wiki is an open source enterprise wiki and can be downloaded and installed behind the firewall. This is a great option for organizations weary of storing their data “in the cloud” as is required by other hosted alternatives.

Version 1.8.3 has some exciting capabilities, namely:

• Support for 9 languages (with two Spanish dialects included)
• Integration to Amazon S3 services for data storage
• Scalability - run 1000s of Deki Wiki instances on a single host
• “Automagic” merge feature when content is edited concurrently
• Easy integration with widgets and apps using Dekiscript and XML descriptors
• Extensions for Dapper and Google services to support the creation of mashups within Deki Wiki pages (this is probably the coolest feature). Extensions are well documented
• Over a dozen new wiki skins

Aaron has put together a video highlighting these new features (check it out here). The most compelling to me is the mashup capability. Dapper is changing the way information is syndicated on the internet, and Deki Wiki has extensions that make it easy to integrate to “dapps” created with Dapper. Data retrieved from dapps can then be fed into Google Charts or Google Maps, for example, to create a rich visual representation of the data.

This could be a game changer in the enterprise wiki market, especially if Mindtouch provides extensions for enterprise mashup makers like Kapow to provide a mashup capability with line of business applications behind the firewall. A partnership there could prove to be very compelling.

I remembered reading about Dapper last year when they were profiled on Techcrunch and thought I’d check it out again to build a demo. Dapper provides a web-based wizard tool that exposes data from virtually any website as a service (which they call a “Dapp”). For example, I’ve created a REST interface with Dapper that returns the latest information on fires burning in Victoria (it’s fire season in Australia), which you can see here, by parsing the content from the table on the Country Fire Association’s current fire page. I can now programmatically overlay this data, which includes fire severity, the number of fire trucks on scene, and fire location, on a Google Map without the CFA having to invest in creating API-based services.

And that’s the value of mashup tools like these - companies can exploit their web-based information assets without having to invest heavily in backend systems integration. Contradicting my recent post where I said companies must have a good SOA strategy before deploying enterprise mashups, “Dapper for the Enterprise” could get us a long way toward achieving the mashup dream without such an investment.

I’m feeling more optimistic about this whole enterprise mashup thing now.

Joe McKendrick hit on a great point when he asked “Is Gartner telling us to ‘make sure there are adults in the room’ before launching into Web 2.0 activities?”. Joe goes on to point out that “All the excitement around various aspects of Web 2.0 may truly be a distraction from SOA”. Mashups, or web-based applications that bring together functionality from multiple systems to do something in aggregate that they do not do on their own (think twittervision), require a mature service oriented architecture from which said functionality can be sourced.

We talk so much about widgets and web oriented architectures (the visual aspect of SOA) that we forget about the significant investment that companies must make to deploy enterprise mashups. I touched on this a few weeks ago, but Dion Hinchliffe mentioned that an immature services landscape is a major barrier to mashup adoption. He writes “Mashups are predicated upon the ready preexistence of ready-to-use Web services and network APIs which are ready to be used to build on top of.”

In other words, if I want to create a Customer Search widget I’ll need to have first developed an interface into my customer database of record that, oh yeah, was programmed in Fortran in 1978. That costs money, and in my experience a lot of companies just aren’t there yet.