ReadWriteWeb

Today Central Desktop launched the Spring 2007 Release of its collaboration platform. Of most interest in this release is that Central Desktop is introducing "a turnkey Intranet" for its enterprise subscribers. Key features of the turnkey intranet include easy setup (without coding or "wikifying" it), a company directory and calendar, password protection for documents, Office 2007 document index support, workspace archiving, an auto-save feature while editing documents, and a dynamic interface that displays personalized data for each user.

Central Desktop is a web-based groupware product which currently has 30,000+ users worldwide. See our review of the product in February, at which time Central Desktop announced an online spreadsheets feature using EditGrid. At that point I compared the product to 37Signal's Basecamp - as it had features including collaborative document editing (wikis), Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. But with the latest announcement of a turnkey intranet, it seems that Central Desktop is becoming more like Google Apps.

This week Optaros released a free survey report entitled 'How Will Enterprises Deliver Next Generation Internet Applications?'. Over 400 senior decision makers responded to the survey, which looked at how enterprises will deliver the next-generation of Internet applications. A little background on Optaros: it describes itself as "an assembler of Next Generation Internet applications (NGI) leveraging open source components". So bear that in mind when reading the report (particularly with the custom development findings, mentioned below).

Key findings of the survey include:

• Custom development is being chosen by a ratio of 4:1 over off-the-shelf software to deliver NGI functionality
• More than 60 percent of enterprises are aware of customer expectations for two way Internet interactions
• Only 19 percent give their current online applications high marks in their ability to offer two way interactions
• More than 64 percent of companies that have added NGI functionality are achieving positive results

I wrote a piece back in January called IBM’s Entry Into Social Networking, where I discussed the potential for applying web 2.0 techniques in the enterprise. Subsequently, I have written extensively about Enterprise 3.0 and the Extended Enterprise trends. A company from England contacted me after reading the IBM piece. This company, Trampoline Systems, is the subject of our discussion today. Its tagline is "Enterprise software that harnesses social behavior". The value proposition is Expertise Location within the enterprise, which encompasses relationships in the Extended Enterprise. I find the product a great combination of NLP (Natural language processing), Knowledge Management, and Web 2.0.

Editor's Note: the rest of this post takes an in-depth look at Trampoline's features. Some of the information below is very technical, particularly the terminology. But it's a great introduction to the product, if you are interested in Enterprise software that uses web 2.0 principles. Incidentally, they are also presenting at ETech today.

Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning 'web 2.0' in the enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed 119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want – and don't want – from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging.

According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0, the enterprise Web 2.0 market "is beginning to consolidate". Apparently CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products "as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors." 61% of respondents indicated that they would prefer both a suite solution and a large, incumbent vendor. According to the report, "integration issues, longevity concerns, and the occasional lack of polish" are counting against small vendors.

Source: Forrester

I am always one to promote the 'read/write' meme and today I noticed a post by Rod Boothby, on what he's calling the read/write Intranet. I didn't see a definition for what this is exactly, but in any case Rod's asking people to vote for the best read/write intranet systems. In the interests of finding out what people think, I've included the poll in this post too (with Rod's blessing - see update #2 in his post).

While I'm on the topic, I'm on the selection committee and will be a judge at the Office 2.0 event, March 23 in California. This is being organized by Under the Radar. Most of the companies below are nominated (along with a bunch of others), so I'm going to be digging into office 2.0 software over the next month or two.

Please contribute to the poll below and let us know in the comments about the innovative read/write intranet systems you're aware of.

I've been following usability guru Jakob Nielsen's annual Best Intranets column for as long as I can remember. This year Nielsen specifically mentions web 2.0, albeit in a very condescending way. The summary is just the start:

"This year's winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach to many hyped "Web 2.0" techniques. While page design is getting more standardized, there's no agreement on CMS or technology platforms for good intranet design."

Enterprises are always "pragmatic" (a.k.a. conservative) about new technologies, so it comes as no surprise they're cautious with web 2.0. But later in the article, Nielsen gets feisty about the hype...

Intranets and News Feeds

I was intrigued by what Nielsen meant, in his summary, by "an editorial approach to news on the homepage". Here's what he said about news feeds:

"Many intranets have long offered news feeds, but this year's winners have taken extra steps to make their news offerings more relevant to employees, both for internal news and for industry-related external news. Labeling and categorization are more extensive than before, and several intranets let users rate and comment on stories."

He then compares the user ratings to Amazon and weblogs, but takes an unnecessary potshot at the latter by saying that intranet user ratings won't be "degraded by the Bozo effect". Not content with that, he concludes: "ratings and comments from colleagues are likely to be much more useful than those of random blog readers". Charming.

This week I've been noticing a lot of Web 2.0-style Office apps coming out. Here's a selection of some of them:

AjaxOffice - "A complete office suite usable via your browser. Your documents are safely stored on a server..."

Writely - "The Web Word Processor" (unfortunately the beta is full already). TechCrunch reviewed it and said: "Writely is a highly specialized niche application built with ajax. Ajax allows this (and other applications) to act very much like desktop apps."

The weirdly named FCKeditor is also an MS Word-like web app. It's open source too. (hat-tip Josh)

gOFFICE - "a browser-based online word processor and desktop publishing program"

Num Sum - web-based spreadsheets (hat-tip Michael Fagan). Interesting service that lets you share spreadsheets, except only the author of a spreadsheet can edit it.

Kiko - Online calendar solution powered by (of course) Ajax. TechCrunch profile here.

Those are just some of the web-based Office apps that have popped up recently. Don't forget established tools like Gmail (Google's email app that blows MS Outlook out of the water) and Chandler (the open source Personal Information Manager that has been in development for a Web eternity).

Interesting also to note this CNET article from way back in 2001, speculating that Yahoo was looking at Web-based office tools. CNET quoted from a survey on the Yahoo website at the time, asking questions about a "full-featured suite of office productivity tools available online through a browser, handheld devices and Web-enabled cell phones." Hmmm, wonder what ever happened to that?! IBM has also talked about server-based office apps in the past too.

Current Crop of web-based Office apps

But really the most interesting web-based Office apps are the current crop of Web 2.0-style apps, built by small start-ups or open source developers. Ajax seems to be a common denominator amongst a lot of them.

Is the development of this new kind of "Web 2.0" Office tool likely to be worrying Microsoft much at this stage?

I'm interested in knowing what other Webified Office tools are out there - alpha, beta or even a glint in a developer's eye. Please add to the comments and let's see if we can build a big list of them.

UPDATE, 5/9/05: In a trackback from klogs.org, I discovered a web-based Powerpoint called S5 and a web-based version of Microsoft's OneNote called (of course) Webnote. Also an online Office suite, thinkfree, which isn't vapourware like AjaxOffice (thanks to my commenters for alerting me to that). Hmmm, I think Microsoft needs to watch its back ;-)