MindTouch is a very interesting social software solution which differentiates itself from competing products. In contrast to most other social software vendors which focus on increased pre-packaging and more out of the box functionality, the strategy of MindTouch is to enhance their wiki-based collaboration platform as an integration point of existing enterprise applications and the related information silos. The platform has a web-oriented architecture and operates on clean XHTML to provide the best integration conditions. Instead of reinventing the wheel by providing all social software functionality out of the box, MindTouch enables customers to integrate specialized social software (i.e. for blogs: WordPress) on the platform and extend its’ capabilities with other web-services. In addition to that the Deki script language allows users to create powerful templates and data-mashups.

As these aspects show, MindTouch is designed to be highly customized and extended so the high rating in this category is no surprise. For the use-cases however, it was hard to decide for the appropriate rating because we had to find the right value in a wide range from the (rather weak) out of the box status to a possible implementation that would leverage the good MindTouch infrastructure (being fully customized, integrated and extended with other software and web-services).

Finally we concluded that in order to be fair we had to stay closer to what MindTouch offers itself (out of the box) and not in combination with other specialized social software like WordPress or vBulletin. Like with all other tools our ratings have to be understood as indicators for strengths and weaknesses of a product not as scientific facts. The MindTouch page gives a good overview about the platform and the product is a valuable add-on for the Social Software Matrix. Please let us know what you think about it and what experiences you have made with the tool.