A few weeks ago I was able to install the Mindquarry Desktop Client on a Mobility Office platform that runs on a memory stick. If you don't know Mobility Office, this is a very cool company that provides portable memory devices like memory sticks, mobile phones or iPods with a special software that allows starting applications directly from the device. This means you can not only have you documents and data with you on the road, but also all the applications you need for your daily work.
Below you can find a few pics of the stick itself and a screenshot of Mindquarry running from it. Using the desktop client from that stick allows you to sync your files directly to the stick and take it with you whereever you go.
2006 was an exciting year for Mindquarry, but it was only the beginning. I remember the day in February 2006, when we had our first meeting with the guys from Hasso-Plattner-Ventures. At that time I was very impressed by the opportunities they showed us which I never before realized. Since then we have moved Mindquarry from „three students and some slides full of ideas and visions“ to a real company with 10+ employees. During this time we‘ve met alot of talented people and learnt a lot about what it means to manage a fast growing company. All this hard work has resulted in the release of the first version of the product at the end of February. With 2500+ downloads in the first week and lots of positive feedback, I think this is a very promising start.
After providing the basic product platform with our first release, it‘s now time for us to make real business. In this article I‘m going to explain Mindquarry‘s technical roadmap that should lead to the implementation of valuable customer services like a hosting service. I will explain the decisions we made so that you have a broader understanding of why we plan some actions and why we skipped others.
Main objectives for 2007
According to our development process, our plans for 2007 are divided into several iterations. Meaning we plan development for small iterations, i.e. 3-5 months. In the remainder of this article I will explain the goals of the first iteration - which is finished in June - in detail and give an outlook about our plans for the rest of 2007.
As mentioned before, the first main objective in 2007 is creating business. That‘s why the most important development goal of the next iteration is setting up the hosting service. The hosting service will allow people and companies to use Mindquarry without spending any efforts on installation and maintenance. It will be available in June.
The second goal is the provision of the Talk component which allows management of conversations regardless of which medium is used for discussion, be it mail, instant messaging or face to face. This couples the plain management of resources and informational artifacts with the ability to discuss about these resources. In our opinion this is a key feature for collaboration solutions, because it allows analyzing the evolutionary history of resources and helps you to understand why a certain task was done or why a document was created. We plan to release the Talk component together with the hosting service in June.
Beside these two main goals some other issues are important for us. Because usability is one of the most important topics in our company, we started a „User Centered Design“ process. During this process we try to analyze how people work and how our user interface should look and feel to support their work as best as possible. A report containing the results of the UCD process will be published for discussion after it's completion (hopefully in April 2007).
Last but not least there is one interesting issue to mention. In addition to our normal work on the product platform, we have started a new project that aims on the development of the next generation document management system. As you might know, currently the foundation is Mindquarry‘s document management is Subversion. While Subversion is working well for developers, it lacks some features that prevent the usage in office and enterprise environments, i.e. replication of repositories, content aware merging capabilities, ubiquitous integration and so on. More details about this project will be published soon.
Summarized, these are the main objectives for the first development iteration in 2007. After it is finished we are going to define the issues for the next iteration. To give an outlook, we plan to deal with integration issues for the rest of 2007. These means providing new features by integrating components of Mindquarry with each other as well as integrating them with desktop applications like office solutions.
Technical challenges
To achieve our goals, some technical challenges need to be solved. For the hosting service we need to investigate a role/group concept that allows isolation of hosting accounts and fits into our REST based architecture. Furthermore we need to develop a resource constraint concept for the provision of several hosting service levels. For the Talk component it has to be analyzed how instant messaging and e-mail can be combined so that discussion can be held and followed using both technologies in parallel.
Welcome to 2007
As you can see, 2006 was only the beginning of the Mindquarry vision. 2007 will be an interesting year as well with interesting challenges on technical and business side. Following our policy of an open community, you are welcome to provide feedback on what features and integrations you are really need, so that Mindquarry will become the future tool that make the most out of your work.