MindTouch just launched their popular open source Sharepoint-like software into the collaboration cloud. Called MindTouch Cloud, this hosted SAAS offering will put them in direct competition of the likes of Google Apps, Google Wave, Zoho, and others. MindTouch will deliver their open source collaboration applications in the cloud for a monthly fee that starts at just $7/month for 50 users. They also offer a free 30-day trial.
MindTouch Cloud enables your employees & managers to pull and aggregate business data from data silos like your CRM, ERP, accounts payable, file servers, email, databases, and others to gain visibility through mashups. You can mashup applications, such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Oracle, and integrate them into documents in team workspaces. MindTouch is targeting Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration platform and Google Apps, though these only offer traditional document and spreadsheet applications without blending in business data. Forrester recently named MindTouch the open source alternative to Microsoft's hot SharePoint product.
Because MindTouch Cloud is open source enterprises will seriously consider this offering. Further, because it is a cloud application, it reduces the requirements to purchase hardware, build redundancy, etc, thus reducing the TCO. In addition, MindTouch Cloud includes instant messaging, video collaboration, status updates, blended business date with charts, graphs, and reports. It also sports sophisticated multilingual capabilities, word blacklist, collaborative video editing and user or IP blocking and banning. Don't beleive it has VoIP, so that would be a nice addition.
MindTouch is targeting Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration platform and Google Apps, which offer classic document and spreadsheet applications without blending in the business data.
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