Forrester is set to release a new report about Web Office, which ReadWriteWeb got a sneak peak at. The report offers new data on office productivity innovation and cloud productivity suite adoption. The full data will be presented at Forrester's IT Forum, to be held in Las Vegas May 19-22, 2009. The data shows that while enterprises are looking forward to innovation in web access and collaboration, they're not so forward-looking when it comes to data integration. Also we discover that the vast majority of IT departments still support Microsoft Office, but very few support Google Premier Apps right now.

Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell "choice" for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.

Collaboration tools and online storage applications offer many possibilities: online collaborative editing, synchronizing across computers, sharing multiple files and discussion boards, and sharing windows and documents on the spot, to name a few. The following review of major products in this space will help you choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.

Single sign-on may seem like a service whose time has past. Meant to provide access to multiple resources through one set of credentials, it initially seemed like a godsend for enterprise I.T. At least, until reality set in. Soon people realized that single sign-on was difficult to set up, risky if not paired with other strong authentication mechanisms, and darned near impossible in real life use cases - so much so, in fact, that some people now prefer the term "reduced sign-on" instead. For the end user - the very person the whole system was supposed to help - SSO was never really that convenient either. But that may be about to change, and all thanks to the cloud and a service called myOneLogin.

The spiraling costs of supporting unstructured data such as active file archives, home directories, data migrations, media storage, and data warehouse extensions is a headache for most medium-sized Enterprises. Zetta, a startup out of Sunnyvale, CA is offering to relieve the mid-size customer of the burden of supporting their growing storage needs.

Enterprises are hamstrung by regulations and governance policies. It's just a fact of life. As enterprises struggle with the need to remain compliant, the exploding popularity of web 2.0 tools and social applications are forcing conversations about trying to strike a happy compromise. Although the notion of "command and control" is unpopular within the 2.0 community, in the Enterprise it's the law. Strict rules govern who has access to what data and which communications must be monitored and archived (in some cases for years). Complicating matters further, compliance regulations vary from country to country.

Dion Hinchcliffe did a bang up job presenting the essence of where we are and what's next for the Enterprise 2.0 community at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco last week. Hinchcliffe has tended to focus on web tools for the Enterprise and explains their utility better than most. But last week's talk focused on this year's issue: a sputtering economy. Hinchcliffe mapped out all the economic benefits that could be derived from a networked economy. Focusing on areas that were transformational, not simply additive, he detailed how social business strategies could help pull lethargic enterprises out of the recession.

I've always felt mashups represent the greatest opportunity to deliver game-changing benefits to organizations experimenting with Enterprise 2.0. Although, a lot of what I've seen in the mashup community I coin "mapups" because they're based on the Google Maps open API plus another interesting data set. Serious mashups are not for beginners and still require a developer's skill, but many vendors are making inroads here - such as IBM and Serena Software.

Because Enterprise 2.0 is a maturing space, there are many competing sources online for advice and opinion. It's sometimes difficult to ascertain who's who and whether their opinion is reliable and credible. I'll be occasionally highlighting voices in the community who've made a significant contribution to moving the Enterprise 2.0 discussion forward, although they may not be well known in a certain geography or technology discipline.

The 2.0 web is heralding massive challenges for today's Enterprise customer. But, who is that customer? Is it the Enterprise buyer with an IT budget? Is it the line of business executive who says, "Screw IT; let's do this" and rolls his own social computing platform by hiring a half dozen open source developers? Is it the departmental user who pays for a wiki with her credit card, recruits her team members and evangelizes on working a different way? The answer is: yes, it's all of these, and no (unfortunately) it's none of these.