Mindquarry will exhibit at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin. Come and visit us! We are happy to provide a special offer to you: Get 100EUR off or a free expo pass. All you need to do is click here to register and the link will carry you to the registration form automatically detecting your special discount.

The free expo pass will allow you to visit us at our booth for free. Please leave a comment below to let us know you'll be there.

See you in Berlin!

Posted at 09:35AM Oct 11, 2007 (Permalink) by Sandro Groganz with tags events  |  Share This Link

Mindquarry closes it's commercial operations. We did a long fight to avoid that. But we became meanwhile a little company, depending on financial support. Without that we must try going other ways.  Lars will for sure not stop to support the community, as long as the community will exist. I will try to support Mindquarry from my personal blog iqupi's world. 

A final summary:

The Minus Side

Mindquarry has not finished the product as a stable version in the way it was intended.
The hosting engine, designed to run on the Amazon server cloud EC2 / S3 has not been finished and reached just a kind of alpha stadium, mainly from a lack of developer resources. That made it impossible to launch Mindquarry GO in time.
Mainly due to that facts, Mindquarry lost the confidence of its investors what prevented to continue the commercial operations.  

 The Plus Side

Mindquarry has gathered a inspired and motivated team, build up a community, delivered a product within one year, developed a leading hosting engine pilot for the Amazon server cloud and created a known brand with the potential to become a key player in the collaboration marked. Customers from all over the world supported us and were waiting for our professional offers.

So what?

We are proud  of the company and our community. We want to thank all people who have set trust in us and supported us. It was our goal, to make a software for better collaboration, to give you a one hand solution for virtually teams. That task was perhaps to big for one year.

Should we have tried less? I don't think so.  Mindquarry is a virtual team solution, providing the needed resources in a single point of access. That makes the Mindquarry software unique.

But we should have done it step by step with better quality in each step to release reliable software suitable for a customer basis.  We simply did not do it that way because we had planned with more time for developing our operations. 

This is perhaps the end of the Mindquarry company as we know it today. This is not yet the end of the Mindquarry product and it's community.

 

Posted at 11:00AM Oct 04, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags business mindquarry  |  Share This Link

Today, we published the prices for Mindquarry GO, our pay-as-you-go on-demand offer. With Mindquarry GO, you sign up and start with team collaboration online - no installation, configuration nor troubleshooting is required.

You can already sign up for the "Max" package providing 100 GB of storage for team content. All other packages will be available September 10.

Find more information at www.mindquarry.com/go/sign-up.

Posted at 02:41PM Aug 08, 2007 (Permalink) by Sandro Groganz with tags mindquarry_go products  |  Share This Link

As I will be offline for the most of the next week and the last week has been one of the most interesting and successful ones for Mindquarry so far, I would like to recap the events of this week in a short blog post:

Monday

• I wrote in my weblog about the faced search for tasks in Mindquarry 1.2, which has been picked up later by Stephan and Michael Sampson, and Forum User BeneM contributed a patch that further improved this feature. Thank you.  
  

Wednesday

• We had a very interesting talk with Jonathan B. Spira of Basex who is an expert in the collaboration business and monitoring the knowledge economy for years.
  

• We launched Mindquarry PRO, our offering for enterprise customers 

  We re-worked our Homepage and have now clearly defined sections for Mindquarry DO, Mindquarry GO and Mindquarry PRO 

Thursday

• I finished my article "Elements of Collaboration" which lists some of the most popular tools and methodologies for knowledge worker collaboration. Since then it has been picked up by some blogs, for example the Bumble Bee. Thank you.
• We rolled out a new version of Mindquarry GO, which means we can now activate an order of magnitude more users for Mindquarry GO beta than we already did. If you are waiting in line for a Mindquarry GO account, the wait is over soon.
• I started discussing new features and implementation in Mindquarry 1.3, the main focus of this release is user and permission management.
  

Friday

• Alexander Saar released the first version of a Mindquarry Plugin for Eclipse Mylyn that allows you to track your tasks in Mindquarry right from your Eclipse IDE.
• Mindquarry (as a product and as a company) is featured by Linux.com. Thank you Joe and Tina.
• Opensource Tutor.com describes how to set up a collaborative learning environment with Mindquarry and Granule

If you want to stay up to date with everything that happens in the Mindquarry community, do not forget to check Planet Mindquarry and the Mindquarry Forum.

Posted at 05:38PM Aug 03, 2007 (Permalink) by Lars Trieloff with tags community mindquarry report status  |  Share This Link

Today, we announced Mindquarry PRO, our enterprise-grade offering, which includes:

• The most reliable, secure stable version of Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software.
• Mindquarry PRO allows system administrators to continously monitor the teamwork software and identify critical problems before they arise.
• The support package included in Mindquarry PRO ensures high availability of Mindquarry installations with a guaranteed response time and unlimited number of incidents to safeguard maintenance. Aditionally, Mindquarry PRO customers can exclusively buy consulting or development services for system integration matters.

The product's home and further information is available at http://www.mindquarry.com/pro.

Posted at 03:17PM Aug 02, 2007 (Permalink) by Sandro Groganz with tags mindquarry_pro  |  Share This Link

• Do you use Mindquarry?
• Did you install it for someone else who is using it?

... and win an iPod Shuffle!

Submit a Case Study

Posted at 05:25PM Jul 17, 2007 (Permalink) by Sandro Groganz with tags users  |  Share This Link

In my previous guidelines I was summarizing up the first steps for administrators and the basic principles of the Mindquarry collaboration way. To recapitulate, we learned ho the administrator is setting up teams and users and whats the idea behind the file section, the wiki and the tasks. Now it's your turn, team members. Are you ready?

Well although some of you might yelling "I'm ready, I'm ready" like yellow squares, there are still some pieces of advice left: So sit tight and read on.

3.  A "Howto" for first day Mindquarry users 

Now you got your login and you are eger to use Mindquarry. You already logged in. You'll arrived at the landing page for first users. It looks nice (at least some think so) with it's fat icons for each functionality: teams, files, wiki, tasks and (soon) talk.  Now take a close look to that beauty, because you'll perhaps never again run into that page. ;-) I'll tell you lather why.

I recommend to start at the team page, just to get a overview about your initial rights and settings. Hit the fat red team button.

3.1 teams: your initial rights

 You'll arrive at the "all your teams page" This is the best page for newbies because most things you can do have the same result: you can choose your current team by either selecting it from the center of the page, from the left navigation bar or from the list box in your navigation button, labeled "all your teams" above the page title.

Why should you choose a team?

Each team has it's own workspace with a on wiki, a own file section, own tasks and own team members. You can work much more focussed by having just the necessary resources for one team You can change your team workspace at any time and in every section by select a new team from the left navigation bar or from the list box in your navigation button, labeled "all your teams" above the page title.

Do I see every team?

No. You see just the teams were you are in. If you think you should participate on other teams (if there are other teams) you can be added by any of the appendant team members or the administrator.

 3.2 teams: your initial user settings

Now choose a team. The page headline become the team name and you see a short description of the team objectives (if your administrator created one)  and a list of all team members. They all should be there, Jack Jones, Kate King, Linda Lobster ... and You. But what is that? Most of them have a nice picture and you got that 10 years old graduation picture?  Your description says you are "a c++ programmer" but you are already "a ruby-on-rails expert"? Don't worry! Look at the almost upper right corner. There are 3 small icons, and the middle one is looking like a business card. Don' hesitate and click on it. Now you are in the "change user profile form". I explained a similar form already in my first article chapter "1.1 Add all possible users". Here you can change your photo (The picture should be .jpg or .png format.  It should be quadratic with at least 48*48 pixels, but it can be bigger). You can change your password and last not least your skill description.  So you load up a pretty cool picture with your new hairstyle and you overwrite "a c++ programmer" with "a ruby-on-rails expert". Now click the "change profile" button so save your changes. If you changed your password, save the changes with "change password".

3.3 Set up your file section

In chapter "2.2 Files" you've probably learned about the collaboration server. Each time you synchronize, you get a copy of your team files. But how to upload the first files to the server?  A catch22 ? No, it's that easy: 

The first team space user creates on his desktop a file directory (like c:/teams/marketing for the marketing team) with all sub-directories and files the according team space should contain and then just sync your desktop with your Mindquarry server. All files and sub-directories will be uploaded.  Now all the other team members with just an empty "c:/teams/marketing" synchronize too and get the files and subdirectories downloaded. Now they may add some more files and sync again and so on.

(Note: Instead of "c:/teams/marketing" can every team member have a different location like "c:/documents/marketing" or "d:/teams/documents/marketing" as long as that is the location they used as local storage path during the desktop client installation: "c:/teams/", or "c:/documents/" or "d:/teams/documents/". ) If you are a member of other teams too, like Sales, the local sales files pace is in the same local path, like "c:/teams/sales".

 3.4 Create a welcome wiki page

In each team or project is often a keeper. (lucky if you have one) This part is for those kind of team members.

I suggest to initiate a kind of "welcome wiki page" Describe the teams goals and objective, create a page for rules or a glossary if you have such stuff, start a FAQ page with initial hints for using the wiki or the Mindquarry desktop client. Create a code of conduct page or whatever comes you in mind to help to promote your teams work. By doing that, you'll give your team mates examples of how to use the wiki and some familiarness with the new software as well. Most people need help in mastering a new software environment. We at Mindquarry can do efforts, to keep it easy to use. But to make your team collaboration project a success story we need you.

3.5 Anything else 

So now you are ready. Go and try it your way. There is nothing you can do really wrong:

You deleted a file by accident. No problem: go to the file section in your team space, grab the time-slider and go to the last version. double click it and it will be loaded (or downloaded) now safe it and with the next sync it will be uploaded for everyone's use again.

Why will you never see the initial landing page?

I suppose you will set a bookmark to a wiki or a team page. In your daily work there is no need for going back to here.  It's just a beauty page for first time users.

 

So thats for now, folks. I would be glad for your feedback. A great place is here: Submit your user experience. Or write a comment to that post. Or email me at stephan(dot)voigt(at)mindquarry(dot)com

Posted at 05:21PM Jul 17, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags collaboration collaboration2.0 firststeps guide howto  |  Share This Link

In the first part of this collaboration guide I was highlighting the first steps for an administrator to make the system usable for common users. Now I want to say some words about the first steps for common users.

2. Basic Principles

2.1 Teams

Every team represents a group of people with the same rights. What teams are standing for, I've described in part one.  

So if you are for example a member of the "Marketing" team and need a kind of sub-group to show results to other people, you'll have to create some more teams like "Interop Las Vegas 2008". To create a new team, you'll currently have to ask your administrator.

But every user can add and remove team members from a team. To do so, go to the team section. On the left side, select your team. Now your teams name is the headline of your page. There you'll see on the upper right side 2 buttons, labeled with "members" and "edit". Hit the "members" button and the "Change Membership" form appears. On the left side are the members of the current team, on the right side are all possibles members left. (Note: if the right side is empty, all possible members are already team members. To add generally new members, ask the administrator) just click in the right side peoples "add member"-link to shift them to the left team side. To remove member from the team, click in the left side peoples "remove member"-link to shift them to the right side with non-members.
Doing the last, you not delete this members, you just exclude them from the current team.

2.2 Files

Mindquarry has a powerful file version control server. For those with more technical interest, the system is based on the Open Source product "subversion". What is the idea behind this technology?

All team members should use the same files and documents with the same file directory tree. And all team members should use always up-to-date files and documents. To do so, the whole teams file directory tree with all files and documents is copied to each user's laptop or desktop computer. The file server is the golden copy and archive.
Who already worked with subversion knows, that this is not the traditional copy procedure. There are more than 20 commands with lots of options each. Basically the subversion server acts like your public library: First the documents have to be registered. Then you "borrow" the document and you "give it back". (Fortunately, the library has enough copies for all readers) If you modified the document, the library treats the modified as the new valid document and keep the previous version for history views.

A very powerful and reliable archive. To keep it simple, we developed a "library broker", a servant for you: The Mindquarry desktop client. He's on your local drive doing all that command stuff for you by one single command: "synchronize".

2.3 How to synchronize?

To synchronize, you have to download the desktop client. Don't worry, it's a smart client, easy to install and easy to remove as well. ("no-footprint-client") To load it down, you have in the file section the big button "synchronize" which will start the download and after the download it starts the desktop client.  (Hint: Mac users should download the special mac version) . The installation is easy. You just have to write the local path for you teams main directory, like c:/documents/Marketingteam. After you did so, you can start to create a file directory tree below that directory and add the first files. With your first sync (open the desktop client and hit the button sync) you install a copy of your local file directory "Marketingteam" on the Mindquarry server. Now everyone else from your team can sync and gets the files from your Server.

Every time you change a document or a file you should synchronize your laptop with the team server (or at least once a day). Now the file or document on the server is updated, and the previous file or document is archived. That's why you are able to see all the past versions in your time line at the file section.

But if you don't change the files but others do so?

Every time you synchronize your laptop with the team server, the server checks out the modification date of the files on the server and your local stored files. If there are modified (and therefore newer) files on the server, the server will download them to your laptop. Therefore you can trust to have alway up-to-date and valid documents and files on your working computer after a synchronization. We recommend to synchronize daily, even when you did not change any file.

What happens if 2 people change the same file?

Your desktop client which is used to do the synchronization shows you a conflict message. In that case I recommend not to synchronize. First take a close look to both versions and decide, which you want to keep:

• if the server version is better, just erase your local file
• if your local version is better, just synchronize and your local version overwrites the server version.

2.4 Knowledge @ Wiki

A wiki is a comfortable way to collect and publish knowledge. It's just easy for every team member to contribute his ideas since that Wiki is very easy to use. (WYSIWYG) Recommended appliances for Wiki's are:

• Gather Ideas for new product features, for events or for your maintenance process
• Publish common conventions and glossaries like name convention for programmers, step-by-step guides for installations or other reference works
• Create user driven documentation by contributions of every team member

To use the wiki just go and try it out. Just some basic important hints:

• To start writing hit the edit-button or double click the Wiki text.
• Create new pages by linking to them from your current page. Mark a word or phrase and use the icon with the red link symbol (a finger is pointing to a red text line) to make that to a link to that new page. Now save and click the new link which brings you to the new and empty Wiki page.
• When you done your editing, don't forget to save! ;-)
  

2.5 Tasks

Tasks help you to get your daily workload sorted.  You can better keep track on your duties and it helps you not to forget to much things. It brings quality and reliability in your work results. Most of you will perhaps use tasks in Outlook or other programs.

Mindquarry tasks are simple to use. They just start with a title and a status. But you see below the label "fields" addition optional fields which can be activated just by clicking on it.  Try something, create an own task and one assigned to an other person. Add a due date. just try to find your own way of usage, use them.

Mindquarry tasks will be continuously improved and integrated into the other components and become an important role in the Mindquarry collaboration way.

 

So thats all for today. Stay tuned for the next part about the first steps for user.

Posted at 03:39PM Jul 16, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags 2.0 collaboration firststeps howto mindquarry  |  Share This Link

You decided to improve your teamwork and got a Mindquarry account, either from the hosted "Mindquarry GO" or from the free download and you already have installed Mindquarry. (did you tell us about your installation in the voluntary registration form? Yes? very good. That helps us a lot to improve our services by knowing our customers) Anyway now you are ready for the first steps:

1. Initial Administration 

The first principle you have to learn is that a administrator is a  administrator and not a user. So after the installation you have the admin login(pwd admin/admin (if you are using Mindquarry GO you'll get your administarion account by email). As the admin you have the following initial tasks:

• add all possible users
• create the necessary team spaces
• add the first members to the according team

1.1 Add all possible Users

Go to the teams section. On the right side you'll see 2 buttons: "new user", "new team". Hit the new user button and a form appears, were you have to fill in the master data for the new user:

• User ID: this is the login-name. You cant that change lather, so use ID's according your common rules, f.e. email, name.surname, nicknames and so on.
• password: use something what is easy, the user can change that lather on his own.
• photo: this can be changed from the user lather on too, never than less I recommend to do that, if possible. It helps the users to feel confident.  The picture should be .jpg or .png format.  It should be quadratic with at least 48*48 pixels, but it can be bigger. The small sizes just load up faster. If you use bigger pictures, the will be resized to the appropriate format automatically.
  
• First name, surname: That should be the real names as long as you are not illegal criminals.
  
• Email: please use the correct email address of the user.
• Skills: that can be changed by the user too,  usually you can fill in descriptions of the role or position, like f.e. "CEO and lightning idol" for me.

Well now you have described your first user. Hitting the button "create" will save that for future use. But hold on a second. First I recommend to send that person an email with his access dates: the web-address were to login (look at your browsers current address) , the login name and his password. (Yes, it's already part of our road map to do this automated soon.) And now, finally, don't forget to hit the button "create".

And now you just have to do that for all users you plan to invite to your team spaces.

1.2 Add all wanted Teams

A team is the space were related people work on a project or a global task. Possible teams may be:

• departments, like Marketing, Finance, Human Resources ....
• projects, like "desktop client development", "coke summer campaign" or "collecting oncology data"
• global tasks (over different projects or departments), like "press wok" or "user reporting"

 
So you go to the teams section. On the right side you'll see 2 buttons: "new user", "new team". Hit the new team button and a form appears, were you have to fill in the master data for the new team:

• Teamspace ID: That should be considered carefully, since you can't change that lather on. The teamspace ID is used to have understandable web-URL's. So avoid difficult and too long names here. Avoid special characters of your local font set. Just keep it simple and understandable, like "financial" for the financial department.
• Teamspace name: That should be preferable the best describing name for your team. You can change that lather too.
• Description: It's always helpful to add some words to the task and goal of the team. But you can change that lather too.

Now hit the button "create team" and you'll done. Repeat that for possible other teams. Every created team should appear in the left navigation bar of the team section.

1.3 Adding Members to Teams

So you go again to the teams section. Go to a team of your choice by clicking it in the left navigation bar. Now the team name appears in the headline of your current page.  You'll see 2 new buttons: "Members" and "Edit". Hit the members button and a form appears, which has all possible members listed on the right side. just click to the "add members"-link in the peoples description and the people will be added to the current team. You added a wrong person? Don't worry, just hit the "remove" link in the persons description on the left team side, and it will go back to the peoples pool. When you adjusted all users to the current team, hit the save button to save your work.

And now do the same procedure for every other team. This part of the administration work can later be done by the team members itself.

 1.4 Further Administration Tasks

Adding Teams and  Team members will always be a task which can be done only by the administrator.

 

Well that's the stuff for today. Stay tuned for the next article about the basic principles of Mindquarry.

Posted at 12:09PM Jul 13, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags collaboration first-steps howto mindquarry  |  Share This Link

Just a quick note for everyone googling for "Mind Quarry" and not finding "Mindquarry". We are called Mindquarry, as we find this is the easiest and most intuitive way of spelling our name. Some people are referring to Mindquarry as MindQuarry with a capital Q in the middle, which is not completely wrong, but we still prefer Mindquarry.

Posted at 10:08AM Jul 12, 2007 (Permalink) by Lars Trieloff with tags mind mindquarry quarry  |  Share This Link