My colleagues at InformationWeek Analytics are doing some important research on Enterprise 2.0 applications and I’d like to personally invite the Enterprise 2.0 community to take part.  Please see the note below from InformationWeek.com Editor-in-Chief, Alex Wolfe.

Thanks for participating.

Steve

InformationWeek Analytics is conducting a survey to determine what’s important to you when you’re choosing Enterprise 2.0 applications, and how vendors stack up against a list of criteria rating the performance, applicability, cost, and reliability of their software. The results will be an IT pro-driven assessment of the vendors and will published in an upcoming issue of InformationWeek as well as an in-depth InformationWeek Analytics report.

Here’s your chance to let vendors know what’s important to you, and where they need to improve their apps or strategies.

Since the readers of the Enterprise 2.0 blog are people who have experience with, and opinions on, these apps, I’m posting a notice here to invite you to weigh in. You can take the survey by clicking on this link.

The survey will take under 10 minutes to complete.  Your responses will remain confidential and will only be reported in aggregate.

Once again, to take the survey, please click on the link.   The survey closes on or about Nov. 5, so please go there at your first opportunity. Thanks to everyone in advance for their input.

Alexander Wolfe
Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek.com

I am always excited about having articles written about our events, but when a major national magazine, such as Forbes, decides to write something related to Human Resources, collaboration technologies and then includes Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara I knew the word had to be spread.

On October 22nd, Rawn Shah wrote a blog titled “Are Collaborative Technologies on Your HR Department’s Agenda?“. Within this he references from the recently released IBM 2010 Global Chief Human Resource Officer study titled “Working beyond Borders” that highlights:

78 percent of HR leaders do not think their organizations are effective at fostering collaboration and social networking. Yet only 21 percent of companies have recently increased the amount they invest in the collaboration tools. Many organizations fail to fully utilize the knowledge-sharing resources they already possess. Only 19 percent of respondents regularly use collaborative technologies to identify individuals with relevant knowledge and skills. 23 percent use collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge, while 27 percent use it to spread innovation more widely across their organization.

Shah, then went on to state that:

This tells me that many organizations are still early in the stages of deploying collaboration systems within their organization, what we refer to as Enterprise 2.0. While it is a strategic need for the organization, there is still much to do to understand how and where they can apply collaborative technologies. When it comes to finding ways to create better linkages between employees in different departments or locations, the HR organization is at the nexus.

If you feel that either you or your HR team could benefit from learning how collaboration technologies can improve communications within your organization, then attend Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara . With a full one-day program (on Tuesday, November 9) at the Santa Clara Convention Center titled “HR Collaboration Strategies“, this is NOT an event to be missed. 

Included in the HR Collaboration Strategies pass is four conference sessions, expo displaying the latest technologies, special programs and keynotes with a special panel titled Human Resources Meets Enterprise 2.0 and the Cloud where you will here from other HR professionals on how collaboration has benefited their organization.

By registering with Priority Code CNUJES25 you can receive $100 off the HR Collaboration Strategies, Full and 3-Day conference passes or get a free Expo Pass.

Coming on the heels of enhancements to LotusLive, Microsoft has now unveiled “Office 365“, the next generation of their former Business Productivity On-Line Services (BPOS). Microsoft’s base offering starts at $24 per user per month and includes desktop productivity, web applications, Exchange on-line, SharePoint, Lync (IM/web conferencing), and both support and management functions. Existing BPOS customers get e-mail, SharePoint, and Lync for just $10 a month. Both offerings are highly competitive with those from Google and IBM (as well as Zoho), and offer significant opportunities for companies to reduce infrastructure and upgrade costs. We find that innterest in hosted messaging services is strong, with approximately 44% of organizations evaluating or planning to adopt such services by the end of 2012, but concerns over privacy, security, availability, the need for off-line access and the ability to integrate hosted services with on-premises applications are gating factors. Evaluate all of these concerns versus the ability to reduce operating expenses.

Is Enterprise 2.0 the chocolate to Social CRM’s peanut butter? In a recent InformationWeek post I commented on the maturing Enterprise 2.0 market and our path towards deeper integration of social and collaborative applications with pre-existing business work flows and applications.

Debates continue on whether legacy apps will evolve enough to provide this collaborative functionality baked into the work flows they support or whether a new category of enterprise software will establish a platform agnostic social application layer that will cut across and intersect with multiple existing applications. In either case, one area that seems to be accelerating towards deeper social software integration is customer engagement and the associated world of CRM.

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The votes are in and the Final Four has been selected! Please help me in congratulating:

1. Flowchart.com
2. Itensil
3. Meetzi
4. Moxie Software

These 4 companies will present live on stage at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara on Wednesday, November 10, 2010. The audience will conduct a live text-to-vote to select our winner. Thanks to all that participated in the Launch Pad competition – and best of luck to our finalists!

IBM announced enhancements to LotusLive this week (see Ed Brill’s write-up for details). At just $5.00 per user with a one user minimum, IBM offers a hosted version of Domino, accessible via either web browser or Lotus Notes client, and including support for Sametime instant messaging. IBM’s offering provides an interesting alternative to gmail for those companies fearful of Google’s privacy controls, or more comfortable with an enterprise-focused product that even includes a more traditional client (with off-line replication). IBM also counters Microsoft BPOS with a more extensible platform that now features a suite of integrated third-party applications including Skype and Tungle. For another $5 per user per month, IBM adds internal web conferencing and collaboration capabilities.

We’ve continued to hear concern about IBM’s viability as an alternative to Exchange for on-premise systems, by going to the cloud IBM leverages the economics of the cloud to bolster its competitive position.