Enterprise 2.0: Think ‘collaboration’

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is underway here in Boston, and companies big and small are already jockeying for mindshare in the nebulous Enterprise 2.0 space. What is Enterprise 2.0 you ask? According to conference organizers CMP, the term describes “technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email.”

OK, so enterprise 2.0 is about ditching e-mail…? Cool! where do I sign up??!

But wait…there’s more. “Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.”

Ok. So that’s general enough that it could apply to pretty much any computing technology in the last 30 years. Where’s the beef?

Judging from some of the announcements that have come out of Enterprise 2.0 so far, the rubber of “Web 2.0” is meeting the road of enterprise IT in areas like enterprise search and Web-based collaboration.

As our own Ephraim Schwartz noted earlier, IBM used Enterprise 2.0 to unveil new collaboration and social networking tools and enhancements to existing products like Lotus Notes.

Using the banner “Web 2.0 Goes to Work,” IBM released three applications: IBM Quickr 8.0, IBM Lotus Connections, and IBM Info 2.0.

Quickr is team collaboration software, and Connections is a social-networking application in the vein of MySpace and FaceBook, but with an enterprise focus. The apps have a lot in common in terms of the technologies underneath. Info 2.0 is a mashup platform for the enterprise.

Companies buffeted by the hype around Web 2.0, a term originally coined by Tim O’Reilly aren’t faring much better with “Enterprise 2.0,” according Anant Jhingran, IBM’s CTO of Information Management.

IBM’s goal, said Jhingran, is to enable grassroots innovation around existing enterprise IT platforms so that they can “embrace and extend” those platforms, in a process he refers to as “open innovation.”

Collaboration is also the idea behind Zoho’s announcement of Zoho Meeting, a platform for doing free online meetings and shared desktops.

“In addition to conducting live meetings with friends or colleagues, Zoho Meeting users can demonstrate products to prospective customers or troubleshoot client issues online. And once concluded, a Zoho Meeting presentation can be embedded as a Flash object in a blog, wiki, notebook, or any Web page,” Zoho said.

Microsoft is also jumping on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon. Company GM of SharePoint Platform and Tools presented at the conference on Monday and unveiled a host of Enterprise 2.0-y updates, including an early release of SharePoint Community Kit Version 2.0, which includes better blogging, wiki, and AJAX development features (details here.) Microsoft also unveiled an internal effort to build and adopt more social computing tools, including a wiki-style resource for information on the SharePoint platform. Finally, the company announced a beta release of NewsGator Social Sites, an add on to NewsGator Enterprise Server that improves SharePoint Server 2007’s social networking features.

SpikeSource hit many of the same notes on Monday when they announced a SaaS (software as a service) version of SuiteTwo, a Web 2.0 appliance that rolls up blogging, wiki, RSS syndication and other hot Web 2.0 collaboration technologies from Six Apart, SocialText, SimpleFeed, NewsGator and Visible Path. The hosted version of SuiteTwo allows companies to do “Enterprise 2.0” without worrying about deploying, then managing new hardware and software, SpikeSource said.

However, the addition of so many new collaboration platforms has really upped the ante for robust enterprise search that can integrate structured and unstructured enterprise data — including information hidden in files on employees’ hard drives and e-mail inboxes, IBM’s Jhingran said. Companies like Altus Learning Systems are at Enterprise 2.0 trying to tap into that demand. The company on Wednesday announced version 5.0 of its Xtreme Knowledge Sharing software (XKS 5.0).

XKS 5.0 is an enterprise knowledge sharing technology that allows companies to access and share information in blogs, wikis and even video files.