We’ve been hard at work on the Serena Mashup Exchange, which will go into a live beta April 2nd at MashupExchange.com. If you’re really, really curious, you can see the unpublished alpha here. There are a few major UI tweaks that we’ll roll out in a few days, as well as upload some additional mashups and web services during the beta period.

We’ve also started to get some cred from blogs like Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise Alley at ZDNet, talking about our platform, HiveLive. We chose HiveLive because their SaaS platform is uniquely tailored to our goals – i.e. we want to enable people to interact with each other, and have the data be a scondary considerations – an artifact of their interaction rather than the focus!

It may seem like a nit, but it’s a true difference between their platform and others. Nothing shows this more than when you attempt to set up data types on HiveLive. Several other vendors we examined in this area wanted 30+k in consulting to simply create a new posting type – let’s say a mashup listing data type which has a zip file containing the actual mashup, a few text fields with descriptions, some images, a video etc. – all of which is a “Mashup Listing”. In other systems, the data types are at the center of the application, and are not easily modified, whereas in HiveLive the people are the center, and data types are easily modified around people’s needs.

Simply put, this means a much more relevant system that saves us thousands of dollars and enables much deeper self-serve configuration rather than customization, which is the bane of all implementation efforts.