To help an organization interact across its parts, MindTouch has introduced MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group. The jointly developed solution comes with a pre-built suite of applications used for project management and collaboration.

Built on top of the MindTouch intranet, Workforce by Dachis Group offers applications (Workforce Projects, Workforce Issue Management and Workforce Comments) for project management, task management, issue tracking and threaded microblogging, said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch. Since these applications are now included with the MindTouch Social Intranet, users no longer have to build these applications themselves, he added.

Dachis Group, a social technology company, was able to create the suite using several components developed by MindTouch, which were released to the open-source project MindTouch Core.

They were able to expand the not yet full-featured applications because of the Web-oriented architecture of the MindTouch platform, which means its RESTful design principles are applied to Web technologies and protocols, Fulkerson explained. “This means the whole platform is stateless and everything is over HTTP, so it’s really easy to scale and extend with any programming language.”

Because the platform also includes an IDE and packaging mechanism, “They were able to very quickly develop a complete application suite to suit their needs, package it up, and come back to us with their finished product,” Fulkerson said.

From there, Dachis Group and MindTouch went to market together, and “we are very excited by the notion of continuing to co-market and sell with customers,” he added.

Aside from Workforce by Dachis Group, MindTouch Social Intranet offers a platform to access user profiles and share ideas, updates, and documents within an online environment. It also includes enterprise dashboards to deliver business intelligence and pre-built connections to Active Directory and LDAP authentication and policy engines.