ReadWriteEnterprise

It's almost time for another Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which means it's time for another Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad contest. The conference will be held June 20 to 23, and winners will be announced on the last day. Past contest winners have included Baydin, CubeTree and Meetzi.

The four finalists for the contest have been announced. Let's take a look.

This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features.

We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the space as a whole and improvement over last year. Each of these products either changed the game, or won it.

Drupal's founder is calling for open source in the enterprise and in the cloud. This should be no surprise, coming from someone like Dries Buytaert. But it is still interesting, considering the source and the point he makes about the actual lack of open source in cloud computing.

Drupal is one of the most popular, open source content management systems. Buytaert created it initially as a messaging board. It went open-source in 2001.