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InfoQ Homepage News MindTouch 2009 Includes Publishing from MS Desktop Applications

MindTouch 2009 Includes Publishing from MS Desktop Applications

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Mindtouch today announced extensions to its Mindtouch 2009 product: Aurelia Reporter, Desktop Connector, MS Word Connector, and Outlook Connector. These extensions are intended to better integrate desktop applications with the MindTouch 2009 industrial wiki and enterprise collaboration tool. At this time, these extensions are only available for the Microsoft Windows platform.

The new functionality includes:

  • Aurelia Reporter - allows users to "publish" content from desktop applications like Visio, Powerpoint, Excel and Quickbooks as MindTouch 2009 pages. Publishing is accomplished via an option on the print menu.
  • Desktop Connector - looks similar to MS Explorer and it enables users to drag-and-drop content from the desktop to MindTouch 2009. Individual items or entire folders (maintaining hierarchy) can be moved in this manner.
  • MS Word and Outlook Connectors - allow one-click publishing of content, including full email threads, to MindTouch.

Once content has been moved, it can be versioned, indexed, searched, and archived just as any other content. The three connectors were also available - in substantially the same form - in MindTouch Deki, but Aurelia Reporter is new to this release.

Aurelia Reporter was developed by Aurelia Systems as a "full featured Internet Document Converter." It converts content from Microsoft applications to HTML and CSS documents to be published as Web pages and/or email attachments. The MindTouch partnership adds the capability to publish to a Wiki, specifically to the MindTouch 2009 wiki platform.

Despite the increased use of Web services, most content is still created using traditional desktop applications. The ability to easily move this content to a shared collaborative workspace can be of significant benefit. In a brief interview, Aaron Fulkerson, Founder and CEO of MindTouch suggested:

In a brief interview, Aaron Fulkerson, Founder and CEO of MindTouch, summarized the perceived benefits of the product:

First, the content retains the appearance it had when created, but because it is converted to a wiki page it shares in the indexing, searching, archiving, and permissioning capabilities that are part of the MindTouch wiki. Second, it demonstrably improves productivity. And third, is is a far easier to use and has an interface that is more intuitive and productive than MS SharePoint.

MindTouch established a large user base with its open source Deki product and, according to SourceForge.net, is one of top open source projects in the world.

 

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