ReadWriteWeb

Plenty of enterprise 2.0 companies have set their sights on replacing SharePoint. But so far, not one has shown the gumption of Box.net, the filesharing and collaboration service which has launched the Box.net vs. SharePoint challenge.

Based on the premise that "sharing should be simple" and implying that SharePoint is anything but, Box.net's campaign is more than a marketing ploy. It's a bold sign of the growing conflict between hungry young startups and Microsoft over who will dominate business collaboration in the years to come.

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

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.

Today marks the 1.0 release of Wagn, a pioneering yet little-known software that wiki inventor Ward Cunningham has called "one of the freshest contributions to wiki since I coined the term."

Created by the non-profit Grass Commons and jump-started by a grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust, Wagn has been quietly honed into a tool that breaks new ground in collaborative software. What makes Wagn special is that it takes the wiki that you know and adds database structure and functionality. Also a simple CMS, Wagn can handle data like no wiki you've ever seen.

Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Today, enterprise-class wiki and collaborative portal MindTouch announced the release of Desktop Suite, a collection of tools for making any Windows document or file web-based, searchable, editable, and shareable through one-click publishing from any application with improved drag and drop capabilities and rapid indexing of content.

In a word, the release allows Microsoft-rooted corporate networks to keep information in a shared, collaborative environment rather than locked in individual PCs' "application silos." The suite includes Aurelia Reporter (for publishing and sharing versioned documents), Desktop Connector (for dragging and dropping files or directories into the MindTouch environment), and Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors (for one-click publishing of documents, threaded conversations, and attachments). These tools enable working via web browsers and permit collaboration without installed software.