ReadWriteEnterprise

On Tuesday, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton won the Open Enterprise Innovation Award at the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The portal that garnered them the accolade, hello.bah.com, has shown impressive adoption within Booz Allen, especially for a firm that's 90 years old. Since being rolled out in August 2008, it's been taken up for daily use by 40% of the 21,000-strong workforce, according to Walton Smith, who's worked as an evangelist for it.

But by now, the flurry of activity around the conference has subsided, and many are left wondering just what about Booz Allen's enterprise 2.0 initiative makes them innovative? What led their social software implementation to be successful, and what patterns and practices can we imitate? After taking a look, here are five characteristics that ReadWriteWeb feels were key to the success of hello.bah.com

There's a new online booking service on the block, and it's called Book'd. While there are several other SaaS outlets for small enterprise to do this sort of thing, two simple characteristics make Book'd standout.

First, it's the only booking service ReadWriteWeb could find that also allows your enterprise to do online invoicing on top of up-front payment.

Book'd is brand new, but to our thinking, it's already got a jump on many of its competitors through plain old good design. Both the administrative interface and the public sites you can build are attractive, intuitive in navigation, and easy to manage.

As a major addition to its on-demand suite, IBM has unveiled LotusLive Connections at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, where it won the Cloud Computing Technology Buyers' Choice Award.

LotusLive has long revolved around Web conferencing, with other features being somewhat secondary. The real power for the enterprise came from IBM's Lotus Connections, which is limited to on-premise deployment. But when LotusLive Connections becomes available on June 30th, all that will change.

MindTouch, the collaborative software that began as a fork of MediaWiki, has just launched the first of three new turnkey collaborative networks for the enterprise that go far beyond the software's beginnings as a wiki.

With the next two scheduled to be made public in the next six months, this first new release is of the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

This intranet is focused on taking all the information from your legacy applications and integrating them in to the much more accessible interface that MindTouch has inherited from its other open source and enterprise implementations. The goal is to take the resources you need and break down the silos that separate them to create a fabric of information that is easy to comb through and work with.

Telligent, a leading community and enterprise collaboration platform, has launched the new versions of both their internal and external platforms, as well as a new analytics package to accompany them.

You may remember the various faces of Telligent as Community Server, Community Server Evolution, and Harvest Reporting Server, but they've all received new, more straightforward branding. Now it's just Telligent Community for the outward-facing software, Telligent Enterprise for the intranet solution, and Telligent Analytics for....well, you get the picture.

A preeminent community platform according to Forrester (the portion behind the firewall was not assessed), Telligent made these announcements in tandem with their presence at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and you can check out the new software powering an unofficial community site for the gathering.

Disclosure: Socialtext is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

On the 30th anniversary of the original killer business application, enterprise platform Socialtext has brought wiki spreadsheet app SocialCalc in to the light of day.

Created in collaboration with VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin, the long-awaited app is the social enterprise successor to Bricklin's original innovation. Begun in 2006 and now in public beta, its a more fully-functional version of his concept of WikiCalc.

Along with the public beta of SocialCalc, the company has transformed its offering in to a freemium price plan dubbed "Socialtext Free 50." The 50-user version will see their collaborative software become available free of cost for the first time.

Central Desktop, a leading SaaS collaboration platform, has entered the ranks of those adding microblogging capabilities. The announcement comes as part of the first day of Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Twitter-like short messaging is the hot new supplement to the feature set of collaborative tools, and there are more than a few startups that revolve around standalone microblogging. But rather than a new interface within the platform or a separate app, the new addition is seamlessly integrated in to Central Desktop's preexisting activity stream.

On top of the 3.0 release of their time management software, Slife Labs now integrates with the financial services of FreshBooks.

Alone, Slife was a fantastic tool for personal and enterprise productivity. By integrating smoothly with a Web-based application for invoicing, its value proposition is increased tenfold.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, employees can now log on to their own intranet portal designed for group collaboration, social bookmarking, and general employee-to-employee interaction. The site, which mimics the social networking phenomenon Facebook, is cleverly called...you guessed it: "Spacebook."

Today's 1.3 release of IBM's free Lotus Symphony productivity suite may not be the most innovative of improvements, but it's a product that addresses core needs of the enterprise as it exists today.

The flagship addition is full support for importing Microsoft Office 2007 documents. Other new features include the ability to drag-and-drop plug-ins, and the export of the files you've imported to either PDF or ODF.