TechNayak

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston has inspired me to write about it. So whats this enterprise 2.0 all about ? Its about mainstream enterprise applications going the 2.0 way. Everyday applications like ERP’s, CRM’s etc going soft and going web. Office automation taking a whole new meaning and likes of Chat, Social Networking , Wikis etc playing mainstream roles in Enterprises. Its an eventual evolution of all things enterprise into a more social, productive and user friendly environment.

Ten years back you couldn’t imagine IM in enterprise software;today most of the enterprise vendors supply their own chat service for support and maintenance. The recent acquisition of Tribe.net by Cisco and the more recent IBM including a social network in the recently revamped Lotus suite are just indicators of how big this phenomenon is. The general know how is somehow concocted to a statement “regular productivity apps like email will be ditched“, is not all there is to enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 will see penetration of tools like blogs, RSS, wikis , Instant messaging and collaboration, which can be defined as the aorta of web2.0 enter enterprise space. The benefits are tremendous in terms of productivity. A social network as a base for all applications makes the software more friendly , collaborative and builds better communication capabilities.  Instant messaging can replace those single sentence emails, wikis can replace knowledge bases. Community portals can represent newletters and bulletin boards. Discussion forums can help solve and analyse problems better. Mindmaps makes brainstorming more productive. RSS and its enterprise filtering can make information management and overload a little less cumbersome to deal with ( see newsgator and Knownow ).

Take Basecamp for example, it encompasses a true project management tool with 2.0 capabilities. Updates through RSS. Blog like memos, easy to use resource and task management interface all this with a very social feel to it. If you look at Zoho and their productivity 2.0 suite, its got everything that any business needs. Online Office automation, wiki tools, mail and chat , their newly released meetings and project all are excellent examples of how 2.0 can be introduced into everyday enterprise applications and not compromise on quality.

The race is on and more and more enterprises will compete to cover as many 2.0 technologies as possible. Not all of them will prove useful but they will be an asset anyway , if not that at least for the sake of competition, the 2.0 radar will be covered. If you are an  enterprise customer and is jittery about trying 2.0 , don’t fret, it may be too late when you do. You wouldn’t something as unimportant as new technology let your competitor get the better of you .