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This year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference offers further evidence that large companies are getting serious about adopting the kinds of online collaboration tools that many of their employees use routinely in their personal lives.... Full Article.

A recent report by ITNews from a research paper by Frost & Sullivan indicates "Social software tools will become increasingly prevalent in Asia Pacific enterprises as the slowing global economy and tightening credit markets continue to bite."

Pfizer is a large global pharmaceutical company with over 100,000 employees. About 2 years ago they commenced a pilot programme for wiki's and discussions which has become an enormous success but not without it's problems. Simon Revell in this presentation highlights some of the issues and how they were overcome.

Here is the link to the presentation - Simon Revell E2.0 2008 - Scroll down the page.

Having been involved in the document and record management software market for the past few years has helped me understand the value of managing documentation in effective and appropriate ways. One of the more interesting insights was the feedback that people only liked a product when they did not know it was there - "it was transparent and/or required little or no effort to use".

I have always been more curious about the information that was being stored and how accessible it would be long term. Early in 2007 there was a more public awareness of social networking products under the now more familiar banner of Web 2.0. Common examples of products in this sector included MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook which continue to have a huge impact with internet users.

What was coming on the back of this development were applications that were being specifically built for business. These applications have been grouped into a category known as Enterprise 2.0.

We could see that a lot more information was going to be produced and a lot more information would need managing. Some of this information was expected to be structured but a lot was going to be unstructured. Could we again see a new platform arriving that would make spare of all the previous work?.

By mid 2007 it was very clear that these new applications were not going to go away and in fact the growth numbers were huge and expected to have a large impact on the ECM market. Organisations, certainly outside of Australia, could see that these new applications could provide them with an ability to provide knowledge management, team collaboration and a means to manage and share information with co-workers, partners and clients. In Australia we have a slightly better understanding of document and record management systems which are prevalent in government, education and large corporations.

The best of both applications would see the "rules" layer and the "database" from an ECM used to provide a regulated central repository for both structured and unstructured information with the flexibility to deliver this information back on demand to the collaboration layer seamlessly - the end user being totally unaware of this function.

The major issue we see is not the technology integration but rather the licensing required from your ECM vendor! We hope sense prevails and "gateway" licenses are used which at the end of the day will but only promote both applications.

We welcome your comments.