Collaboration in Context: Supporting Business Systems

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Nov 5, 2010

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MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce from Dachis Group MindTouch (news, site) has a new version of their Intranet solution out today, Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group. It is collaboration in the context of true business systems and a clear example of why you need a platform, not just simply an out of the box application to get the capabilities you really need.

The MindTouch/Dachis Connection

A little background. Back in June, Dachis Group selected MindTouch to be a part of their strategic collaboration platform. MindTouch is the base for the Dachis Group’s Collaboratory. The Collaboratory is their internal collaboration laboratory for testing and operationalizing social business environments.

So basically, Dachis Group has implemented MindTouch and is using it as their collaboration platform. Pretty straightforward. Kind of like a customer win, something we don't typically discuss. But it gets a little interesting from here for a few reasons.

Expanding on the MindTouch Platform

There are a number of collaboration solutions on the market right now. Many of them call themselves platforms and some actually are. A platform enables an organization to extend a solution to fit their needs and requirements. Because the truth is, while we may have a lot of the same base requirements, there are always nuances to how we do our business that drive us to customize.

And this is what Dachis Group has done with MindTouch. According to Bryan Menell, Director of the Collaboratory, Dachis got tired of using a number of different applications to support their work (Basecamp was one these applications). He indicated too many logins, too many screens. They wanted to reduce complexity, and as a result increase adoption, a perfect reason for the MindTouch platform.

And so, leveraging MindTouch, they built an integrated project tracking system, issue management system and threaded micro-blogging application. For the most part, there is no major breakthrough application here, it's all fairly standard capabilities. The key is that it is all integrated into a single platform — one login, one place to work.

Enough of the customer win warm and fuzzies, what's the point?

Giving Back to MindTouch

MindTouch and Dachis have maintained an open dialog on what they are doing with the platform, how they are addressing things like customer needs and so on. Obviously MindTouch was impressed with what Dachis had done with the platform, and as a result the two have collaborated on the next iteration of the MindTouch Social Intranet (formerly known as the Collaborative Intranet).

Dachis turned their applications over to MindTouch. Why didn't they keep it for themselves? What are they getting out of it?

Well they planned to keep it for themselves actually. But they also thought that their own customer base would like the solution and that there are others out there needing the same capabilities in a single platform. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch told us that they took the applications, applied some spit and polish (my words not his), primarily QA and packaging, assigned a team to continue evolving the suite and in return provide Dachis with a much lower cost of maintenance (so Dachis can influence new functionality, but not have to build or maintain the applications themselves).