Enterprise 2.0 Rife with 'Social Business' Annos -- ADTmag

WatersWorks by John K. Waters

Enterprise 2.0 Rife with 'Social Business' Annos

Vendor announcements were flying fast and furious at the recent second edition of the Northern California Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The conference, which "explores the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives," drew an estimated 1,400 attendees to the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Boston edition has been running for 6 years.

During his conference keynote opener, conference director Wylie called Enterprise 2.0 observed that "just a couple of years ago, as a market, we were all fighting for legitimacy amid the broader enterprise applications market, and today you all are leading what many believe to be the next truly transformative shift in business, the shift to more people oriented social and collaborative applications."

Okay, he's the conference director, so he can be forgiven this bit of hyperbole. And he also had some actual news: The conference organizers are launching a new website next year, called The Brain Yard, a site focused on the E2.0 community that he promised will be "chock full" of industry news, analysis, opinions, and case studies on the enterprise collaboration and social software industry. Should be interesting.

IBM announced a new release of its Lotus Connections enterprise collaboration platform, as well as an enterprise social software support service. (Say that three times fast!) Version 3.0 adds a new set of "social analytics" to mine the growing piles of social data growing today within the enterprise.

Socialtext unveiled version 4.5 of its namesake enterprise social software at the show. Socialtext 4.5 is designed to make it simple for employees to share relevant knowledge across departmental boundaries, and to sort, curate, and discover that information later with the context in which it was generated. A feature added to the product last summer, Socialtext Connect, lets companies integrate social software with their traditional systems of record, such as ERP or CRM. Socialtext 4.5 also adds Socialtext Explore, which lets employees access microblogging messages, pages, posts, pictures, and files they share with each other at work.

Some other noteworthy vendor announcements:

Moxie Software announced the Winter 2010 release of its social enterprise software, Spaces by Moxie. This release puts the company's knowledgebase at center of the platform, "bridging the gap between Social CRM and enterprise 2.0" with capabilities for capturing and sharing knowledge among employees, trusted partners, and customers.
NewsGator unveiled News Stream for Social Sites 2010 and Idea Stream for Social Sites 2010, modules designed to leverage the company's RSS and management technologies to boost information sharing for Microsoft SharePoint 2010. According to the company, Social Sites is the only social computing suite to fully integrate with SharePoint.
Oxygen Cloud, a company that combines cloud storage and collaboration "to transform the way business users work," showed off Oxygen Stream, a new application designed to allow users to follow, communicate, and engage in collaborative projects through a unified activity stream.
Rhomobile introduced what it describes as a new category of software: MEAP 2.0, which is "a comprehensive, multi-pronged solution enabling enterprises of all sizes to utilize the power and productivity of web technologies and the cloud to develop, distribute, deploy and manage native smartphone applications and data to their mobile workforce."
Sococo announced the commercial availability of its first service, Team Space, an always-on group communication service for distributed teams. Team Space is designed to provide an "intuitive spatial layout" that allows people to see office interactions as they occur and initiate ad hoc meetings. (One of the cooler products at the show.)
TicTacDo launched a business edition of its TicTacDo social productivity service. On top of a collaboration and task management platform, this edition provides a "know-how" system, based on ready-to-use checklists and experts.
Traction Software introduced a new action-tracking feature that's integrated with the Traction TeamPage. "One click adds an action tag to any page, comment, status post or paragraph with automatic rollup by person, date, milestone or project, putting project management in the natural flow of work," the company says.
Yammer, a provider of enterprise social networking solutions, showcased its newest applications: Polls, Events and Questions. The apps are designed to enhance the actionable structure of Yammer messages.