Open source startup review: Mindquarry
I took a look at Mindquarry today, a new open source collaboration company funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures. The company is based in Germany. Mindquarry licenses its software under the MPL.
Mindquarry's core product is a collaboration server that allows teams to collaborate on documents, as well as via wikis and shared tasks. It's an interesting product now, but should get much better with the release of its email integration, due out this summer according to the company's roadmap. All in all, it feels like a simple alternative to Sharepoint or Basecamp, a comparison the company has made.
What's missing? Well, email integration for one. I think that's the holy grail of pretty much all collaboration/content management. It's no good trying to coax users off email - it's how people collaborate (along with IM), and everything else (Wikis, forums, etc.) is an afterthought compared to email. I also don't know how robust the company's document management functionality is (though I know a good source for that sort of thing :-). Overall, I think the company is going to need to ensure it has robust communication functionality built into its collaboration server, so that customers can collaborate in ways to which they're accustomed.
Still, I think this is a great 1.1 product for the collaboration space. I suspect we'll see a lot more of this in the months/years to come, as enterprises try to figure out how to manage all the information they're creating, and the process for creating it.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
