Menori

For the past month I’ve been whizzing around at a few conferences, travelling quite a bit, building cupboards from IKEA and generally not doing very much blogging. However, that hasn’t stopped me from taking time out to check what’s going on in the world of the Web (and how wide it is!)

Web 2.0 seems now to be filtering into the Enterprise space. We knew it would, but what is interesting is that this latest set of new companies (or existing ones who are branching out) are now focusing on the social network aspects rather than simply taking the office suite onto the Web. Connectbeam are a company providing del.icio.us for the enterprise. I’ve often though about being able to share links and favourites with a much more broad audience. In the organisations that I’ve worked in this has typically been done by collecting a series of links and posting them onto a web page that multiple people can access. However, this lacks the ranking and tagging that the likes of del.icio.us provides. Will such a product take off? Probably not really, I think bookmark tagging is a bit ‘new’ for the most part and although users of del.icio.us might take to it I’m not convinced this is for the general populace yet. Once such technologies have proven themselves to be the norm (and Yahoo! actually do something with del.icio.us, possibly rolling it in to its all ready extensive directory of web sites) then it’s likely they’ll be rolled into corporate offerings such as SharePoint, Documentum, SAP etc. It’s difficult enough for corporate employees who are users of IT to get their head around meta-data for documents let alone confusing the matter with tagging of links.

Although Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes some blogging and Wiki functionality (I’ve tried it and it is quite basic) the popular public blogging tool WordPress now has a enterprise release. A company called Knowhow recently announced that they would resell WordPress to organisations for internal corporate usage. WordPress provides an excellent platform for organisations to blog internally. In fact the first uses of blogs I thought about would be for keeping project diaries and to deliver team briefings. A blog makes an excellent addition to project site and supplementing the capability of the MOSS 2007 blog tool would be a better solution than using WordPress internally. A future release of Community Server is touted as having better integration into MOSS 2007 (currently it’s still quite a chore to set up) which is likely to be a viable solution for good document library / blog integration.

Finally, and not related whatsoever, I’ve successfully used 10 Minute Mail to register at a few sites that require email registration but that I don’t want to use a specific account for. At a recent count I have 5 email addresses that I use on a regular basis and of those I have an additional 5 or 6 alias. 10 Minute Mail creates an on the fly email address for you which lasts, you guessed it, ten minutes. Just enough time to register for the user name and password or the email link to a whitepaper that you might want to get at, without all the subsequent spam.

So will this move into the enterprise space spoil the vibe for Web 2.0? I don’t think it will, although clearly a lot of organisations are trying to crave their own niche and get their hands on the Web 2.0 bounty. Vlogs, blogs, wiki’s, tagging and the like are here to stay maybe just integrated into the products we know and love or maybe with a new slant. Maybe it’s the delivery technology which is the area to watch, after all both YouTube and MSN’s Soapbox both use Adobe’s Flash to stream the video to your computer. Clearly for the likes of Microsoft an industry segment needs to reach a few billion dollars in worth before they take note as this Wall Street Journal article suggests.

posted using BlogMailr