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Idea management software seeks two "holy grails" of enterprise collaboration technology: 1) innovation and 2) the breaking down of silos. Enterprise idea management has been around for over 10 years, but according to Mark Turrell, co-founder of pioneering idea management company Imaginatik and current CEO of Orcasci, there's been an "explosion of interest" in the field in the past 18 months. Here are a few of the trends in the area that we've noticed.

Info-Tech Research Group released its evaluation of enterprise collaboration software earlier this year. Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Open Text's Open Text Social Media 7 won the highest praise. But as worker expectations change, there's clearly room for competition on usability.

It's exciting for us to see young companies like Jive grow so fast. But before we pop the champagne bottles, it's important to take these results with a grain of salt.

Jive announced today that it had record results for the past year, up 85%. That's impressive in the sense that Jive is proving that its technology is gaining acceptance in the market and the fact that the company, founded in 2001, is almost 10 years old.

But we also need to consider that with any young company, there's a lot riding on news like this.

"Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that's all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?" Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It's not very useful or inspiring.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

Portland, Oregon's Jive Software is launching version 2.0 of its year-old enterprise collaboration suite called Clearspace tonight and it looks like a lot of fun to use.

The service takes on Microsoft's Sharepoint with a feature set that looks like something many consumer software users would be envious of. USAToday recently said that "Jive Software wants to be the Apple Computer of corporate social networks."