Virtualization Daily

Wiki vendor MindTouch has just released their Deki wiki software as a VMWare virtual appliance. MindTouch had been distributing Deki as a hardware appliance for sometime so it’s not surprising to see this come about.

MindTouch, the most comprehensive vendor of business wiki solutions, today unveiled MindTouch Deki, the world’s first business wiki implemented as a virtual appliance. MindTouch Deki is a business software that installs in 15 minutes, giving different workgroups in organizations the ability to share information and collaborate with colleagues almost instantly and securely on their own network.

MindTouch Deki is a complete pre-installed, pre-configured application and operating system that runs on any Windows or Linux machine. Scalable from small workgroups to large enterprises, it runs atop VMplayer, a free virtual appliance player from VMware. This innovative product significantly cuts the time, expenses and hassles associated with traditional enterprise software products that require dedicated IT staff for installation, configuration, support and maintenance throughout the ownership cycle. It also enables content portability whereby users can move both the wiki application and its content from machine to machine, even to removable storage devices up to 100 Gigabytes. “We have researched and evaluated various wikis for over a year and found MindTouch Deki to have the best combination of easy installation, rich functionality and superior operational support. It saves our IT team a significant amount of time to deploy and manage, doesn’t require investments to train support personnel and has practically no learning curve for our user community,” said Joe Stevenson, technology architect for SEI, a leading global provider of outsourced asset management, investment processing and operations solutions in Oaks, PA. “MindTouch Deki is what a wiki should be - easy, fast and useful. We plan on adopting the product across the company moving forward.”

Here’s the link to download and it’s also listed on VMWare directory.

I’ve been interested in Deki for sometime so I’m anxious to try this appliance out. Running it on Mac OS X using VMWare Fusion didn’t work, though I suspect that’s more of a problem with VMWare Fusion and its flakey networking than it is a problem with the appliance. I’ll need to try it on one our other VMWare systems, but overall it looks promising and I think they may have a pretty solid offering with this release.