Stories by C.G. Lynch

A few years ago, companies were grappling with how to harness Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networks inside the enterprise. Over time, on a departmental level, business leaders would buy these technologies with or without IT's blessing to help meet their internal collaboration needs.
As people learned it was more efficient, for example, to put shared information into a wiki rather than emailing a Word document around to 50 people, the term Enterprise 2.0 was born.

As the Enterprise 2.0 conference unfolds in Boston this week, the whole software industry will be observing Microsoft's shift to online services, as it responds to the cloud computing model championed by competitors like Salesforce.com, Google and start-up social software vendors.

This week represents an important inflection point for the Enterprise 2.0 market, a set of software vendors that sell social networking technologies to businesses. Analysts say the number of competitors will consolidate in the coming year as Microsoft captures greater market share. The start-ups that will survive must carve out a long-term place for themselves by building applications that are far more innovative and cheaper than those of the incumbent software giant. In addition, they must convince businesses that Microsoft SharePoint's "good enough" strategy is not, in fact, good enough for today's enterprise collaboration needs
As Enterprise 2.0 vendors convene for their annual industry conference in the US this week, many continue to fight the complacency of businesses who prefer to use Microsoft as a default choice for all their enterprise collaboration needs. SharePoint, an application that started as a document management system to store (among other items) Microsoft Office files, has since added social features, including profiles, blogs, and wikis. Although Microsoft's smaller, more nimble competitors have built more sophisticated social networking applications for businesses, analysts say SharePoint has been "good enough" for many companies.

Though it started selling software to universities and small businesses, Google has pervaded more large businesses during the past year with Google Apps, the company's suite of messaging and productivity software. Analysts say Google Enterprise, the division of Google that runs Apps, has added many features to the product that make it more attractive to enterprise IT departments.

Google Wave, an upcoming Web application that mixes old technologies like e-mail, IM and online documents in a unified, socially-oriented view, could break down the traditional ways in which we compartmentalize and separate information - both as consumers and businesspeople.

One of the most fundamental rules of social networking etiquette: You must carefully consider who you "friend" or "connect" with on services like Facebook and LinkedIn. According to career experts, the people with whom you associate, in many ways, reflect upon you.
Deciding who to connect with, however, can be a tricky endeavor, since social networks have grown to include people from your personal and professional lives. Some people choose to connect with colleagues on Facebook, while others decide that they want to keep that network for just friends and family.

As more workers spend a greater part of their days on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, hackers have turned their energies toward spreading their malware across those services, harming workstations and company networks.

Social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have enabled everyone to become instant publishers. As a result, the content attached to our names will continue to shape perceptions of us both professionally and personally.

While Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks have been wildly popular with consumers, efforts to measure the technology's success for businesses have returned mixed results. In fact, recent research from the Burton Group indicates that business leaders have struggled to define best use cases, measure their success and chart returns on investment.
But Embarq, a high-speed internet and phone company serving 5.7 million customers (both consumers and businesses) in 18 states, has had some early success making Web 2.0 part of its overall innovation strategy to improve idea generation and ultimately create new products.

Though LinkedIn tops the list of professionally-oriented social networks for job seeking, you can also use Twitter to get the word out about your skills and talents to relevant people in your industry.

Twitter remains a very nascent social network, so if you don't know how it works or what it does (or you haven't even heard of it), don't feel bad. In fact, you're still in the majority. But we're here to help you reap the benefits of Twitter with this quick get-started guide.

Dave Morin, 28, sits at the epicenter of the <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/478272/subject/Facebook+Inc.">Facebook</a> Economy, and at first glance, the backdrop looks pleasant. Outside Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, gentle sunshine bathes the wine bars, sushi restaurants and coffee shops along University Avenue on a criminally beautiful, 70-degree Monday in January.

Wikis can seem like a godsend to many corporate end users who've tried messy and unsatisfying collaboration via e-mail and other traditional corporate tools.

Facebook and other social networking sites can create an uncomfortable overlap between your personal and professional life. We show how to manage your Facebook profile so it can work for both business and pleasure.

The announcement earlier this week that Microsoft would offer fully web-based versions of SharePoint and Exchange brought the software giant further into the fold of hosted application providers, allowing it to compete with competitors new (Salesforce.com, Google) and old (IBM). But for Microsoft, even after the launch, some questions remained.
The big one: Why will a fully web-based version of Microsoft Office not hit the browser until late 2009? Also, how will the emergence of hosted applications affect the company's business model, which garners a good chunk of its revenue from the high margins of installed, on-premise software?