Packaging Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise

It's been an amazing week here at FierceContentManagement, with plenty of new announcements, briefings and sneak previews. There has been so much happening this week, it was hard to figure out what to write about for this week's Editor's Corner. While cloud computing got lots of attention with the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform [1] announcement, I decided to focus on two announcement that package Web 2.0 for the enterprise--Web 2.0 in a box, if you will--making it easier and faster to implement Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, Wikis and tag clouds.

More than three years after Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 [2], many companies still don't understand how Web 2.0 applies to their business or how to use Web 2.0 tools effectively in an enterprise to communicate with internal and external audiences. Now, two new products hope to fill that void with out-of-the-box Web 2.0 functionality: Alfresco Enterprise 3 [3] and Open Text Red Dot Web Solutions Suite [4].

Marcie Maddox, director of global product marketing at Red Dot says many customers have expressed interest in Web 2.0 technology, but don't know where to start. "Web 2.0 is an area where some customers are not sure quite sure how to implement it," Maddox says. She adds, the customer base has been asking Red Dot to give them some ideas so they can deploy two-way communication applications, such as Wikis, on existing web properties. By providing a new out-of-the-box tool set, Red Dot enables these companies to get something going, then make tweaks as they move forward.

John Newton, founder CTO at Alfresco [5] agrees and his company has taken a similar approach, but with an open source product. "What we have done is taken all the components that people have asked for and made it part of the application." With Alfresco's dashboard approach, end users can drag and drop different components into their personal view. Newton says they have also taken the concept of the Facebook feed and brought it into a business setting. "The Facebook feed is a paradigm of how people are doing this, making that available to see a feed of changing content."

As we head down the evolutionary path of Web 2.0, it's clear that many companies are still on the outside looking in and want to get in the game, but aren't sure how to do it. By providing an easy-to-implement package of tools, these two companies, each in their own way, are offering a foot hold to companies (perhaps like yours) hoping to launch Web 2.0 functions.

In the end, Web 2.0 is an easy buzz word that quickly loses any meaning. But at its core, Web 2.0 is a set of extremely useful tools and technologies that encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing, and enable you to engage in meaningful, direct dialog with your employees, customers, partners and suppliers. It's no wonder that companies want in on this, and it's not surprising vendors are trying to make it easier for them to do it. - Ron [6]