Bringing Web 2.0 To The Enterprise - What Does It Take?

You have heard it too many times, you read about it every day, you interact with it, your co-workers, employees, everyone is talking about it in one form or the other, and consciously or otherwise, you are very much a part of it. The WEB 2.0 It's big and growing.

The twitters, the Facebooks, the LinkedIns, the delicious, the flickrs, and an ever growing range of services that pop up online every single day. It is spreading like wildfire, and now it threatens to invade your safe havens, and come inside the firewall.

You like the Web 2.0 because you love the services, you love your interactions with it, it has made browsing, sharing, and connecting with your family and friends, very easy, and a lot of fun. But, the talk about bringing it within the firewall, all the talk about Enterprise 2.0 makes you uneasy.

Web 2.0 is not just about personal profiles, blogging, instant messaging, poking, sharing photos, and videos. It is a set of standards, and practices for collaboration, sharing, design, and technology concepts. While bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise means using those standards and best practices, the design and technology concepts within the enterprise, to enhance it.

Web 2.0 = Culture Shift

For the upcoming generation of the newly or soon-to-be employed, Web 2.0 technologies provide an important new way of communicating and sharing information. Web 2.0 represents more than a change in technology, it is bringing a cultural shift in the way people work, collaborate and share knowledge. A premium is placed on transparency. The degree of transparency is controlled by the author ranging from complete free-flow of information to everyone, or moderated flow of information to a controlled group. A sense of community and collective contributions is a hallmark of the Web 2.0 world.

The cultural shift with Web 2.0 is adding a twist to a major generational changing of the guards underway in the workplace, as the OLD begins to retire. In their place, a new generation is coming into the workforce with different expectations and a Web 2.0 work style characterized by a strong sense of openness, group contributions and a blurring of the lines between the social and professional that runs counter to the traditional corporate model.

SharePoint as an Enterprise Web 2.0 Platform
SharePoint Features and Benefits
" Provides out of the box collaboration features like blogs, wikis, discussions, project management, document libraries, lists etc., that are easy to use and allow information workers to share and manage contents.
" Allows building applications that are supportable, extensible and easily maintainable by business users.
" Workspace templates along with the collaboration tools can be used to manage specific information about projects, IT, HR etc.,
" Advanced Document management capabilities with support of content types allows information workers to easily create documents, fill information and share them securely
" Can be a single platform for Intranet, Extranet and Internet with support for hosting to provide applications and software as service
" Supports collaboration both within the internal users, external users, and anonymous users of the Enterprise.
" Supports out of the box reporting dashboards, KPI web parts etc. that can be used to build mash ups and integration with backend systems.

There"s no question companies can benefit from Web 2.0 technology. And organizations can use the technology to offer dynamic new ways to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration, and make people more productive in their work lives.

If companies can strike the right balance with Enterprise 2.0, the possibilities are enormous. But the time to plan for and begin to use these new technologies is now. Web 2.0 is here and it will find its way into your organization one way or the other. The opportunity to harness the power of Web 2.0 shouldn"t be missed.

But just having that is not sufficient, the use of the right kind of technology platform is of utmost importance, and that is why we think, SharePoint is a great platform for building robust and flexible self service and social applications that are extensible and secure, and it provides the tools to leverage Web 2.0, within the Enterprise, in a holistic fashion to empower business users, and help organizations become more agile, efficient and productive, all in a seamless, integrated and secure fashion.