ReadWriteWeb

Dennis Howlett got the attention of the Enterprise 2.0 community today, with his continued skepticism about "social" technologies and their place in the business world. Here's a quote from his post entitled Enterprise 2.0 - the non-debate:

"Why am I not surprised? I've argued for years that the notion of anything that has 'social' attached to its moniker is about as welcome as breaking wind in a spacesuit."

Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010 that will integrate with third-party applications from its partner network. No date has been set for the marketplace lauch but it will evolve from "The Gallery" a feature that provides Sharepoint 2010 users access to templates.

IBM announced today a set of cloud services that will allow developers to develop and test cloud applications. In addition, IBM is offering free compute and storage for developers using the IBM platform.

Earlier today Novell demoed it's Google Wave-like product to the enterprise world. Pulse is the latest workplace collaboration platform to announce at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference and ReadWriteWeb was lucky enough to catch up with Novell's VP of Engineering Andy Fox for a demo of the new tool. The beta product is expected early next year.

Second Life is introducing a behind the firewall service for enterprise customers, another sign that the very definition of collaboration is changing as more companies seek ways to do their work in virtual environments.

In addition, Second Life will unveil a marketplace in the first quarter of 2010 where people may purchase templates and other 3D environments for their Second Life Enterprise world.

Is Enterprise 2.0 a crock? Where are the use cases? Seven enterprise managers spoke about five principles that are emerging around this topic at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today in San Francisco.

CubeTree is launching a new service today that makes documents into items that can support comments, adding a new dimension to how users can interact with spreadsheets, slides on a presentation and other content.

"Social documents," is what CubeTree calls the ability for users to comment on documents. The company, which is exhibiting at Enterprise 2.0, is one of the new players to the collaboration space.

Yammer came to the market with one of the first microblogging services. In the span of their existence, a number of companies launched their own versions of an activity stream. But Yammer looks like they have the customers to prove they have a hold on their sector of the market.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference Andrew McAfee made a few points about the approach to enterprise technology and how it might be changed a bit.

McAffee, of the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, is considered the father of Enterprise 2.0. His views reflect how Enterprise 2.0 is evolving but still with a fair degree of resistance for its adoption.

In the Web 2.0 heyday, Netvibes had that star appeal that few companies ever experience. Their platform for creating personal dashboards rocketed in growth. Web innovators sang its praises. But you know the story. Netvibes struggled to find a business model.