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The question I always come back to when I hear the term Enterprise 2.0 is one that I think my buddy Dennis Howlett would ask. I mean, who gives a flying trombone? That's not really how Dennis would say it. I will let him express himself in his own words about why anyone in their right mind would pay for anything with a high price tag that has a big fat social label on it.

Here's what gets me. We get so wrapped up about collaboration concepts and the nuances of social. In this upside down world, social is a term that is more commonly use to describe enterprise architecture than it is about sharing a beer with your mates.

Last year, when we asked whether Facebook could break into the enterprise world, Constellation Research CEO and principal analyst R "Ray" Wang said "I'd see LinkedIn in this category first because they have the trust of the corporate and professional communities." LinkedIn may never get into that business, but there a few ways you can use LinkedIn for working with teams today. It's become a popular choice as a login system, so it's a natural fit for project collaboration software-as-a-service providers.

Today co-founder, president and chairman of Socialtext Ross Mayfield announced on his blog that he is stepping down from his day-to-day duties at Socialtext and joining SlideShare as vice presdent of business development. Mayfield told us about the move: "SlideShare is obviously different but what it has in common with Socialtext is being at the boundary between consumer and enterprise, which is my favorite place to play." Mayfield has been an adviser to SlideShare for the past four years. He will remain the chairman of the board of directors at Socialtext.

Socialtext was one of the first companies in the enterprise 2.0 space, and the first to offer an enterprise wiki. "Whatever your enterprise 2.0 / social business poison, our industry owes a lot to Ross for persistently questioning how we work," Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group tweeted in response to the announcement. We discussed Socialtext's role in the development of enterprise social software earlier this week.

TIBCO's enterprise 2.0 offering tibbr has been a long time in the making. We first covered it in Oct. 2009. It was finally released from beta today, and the reaction has been positive. It seems that TIBCO took its time and got the product right. It may be a bit late in the game, but Tibco has serious enterprise credibility and a solid product.

This, along with the announcement that Microsoft's OfficeTalk may be commercially released, reminds us that there is still room at the enterprise 2.0 table for products from established enterprise vendors.

Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.

But what about Quora for the enterprise? As in, an internal questions and answers for work related questions? Quora hasn't ruled-out doing this itself, but founder Adam D'Angelo says that it would be too much of a distraction for the company to do so anytime soon. In the meantime, two companies offering a Q&A solution for enterprises: MindQuilt and Opzi.

CRM and social CRM expert Paul Greenberg finished posting his CRM 2011 Watchlist series this week. It's six parts totaling more than 35,000 words. It's a much more detailed and comprehensive view of the CRM space than you would expect from a Magic Quadrant or Wave report, and it's completely free. Greenberg covers both vendors and consulting companies. It's less formal than the Magic Quadrant and Greenberg does a lot of shooting from the hip.

Greenberg used the following subjective criteria to rank the companies: financial performance; management; state of technology products; partnerships/alliances; mission/vision; market presence/impact; thought leadership and corporate culture. Greenberg didn't rank the winners in any particular order, but he did reveal which vendor scored the highest. The answer probably won't surprise you.

Whether you call it "enterprise 2.0" or "social business," one thing is for certain: you're going to need at least some tools to implement it. SaaS delivery models are all the rage for enterprise social media companies, but not every organization is ready to store its data in the public cloud. Several vendors offer its products as on-premise, installable software or virtual appliances. Others take a different route: a managed appliance. Blogtronix, Socialtext and Yakabod all offer on-premise, physical appliances that can be dropped into a rack and used right away. The goal is to combine the convenience of SaaS with the security of an on-premise solution.

"What are the distinctions between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0?" is a question on Quora that is getting pretty hot. But the debate exploded in November during Enteprise 2.0 Santa Clara. And the roots of the debate are a bit older than that, going back to the Dachis Group's definition of "Social Business Design," which stands in contrast to Anderw McAfee's definiton of Enterprise 2.0.

Some have framed the debate as essentially people (social business) vs. technology (enterprise 2.0). I don't think that's really what the debate is about. I think it's mostly about differing factions of analysts and consultants wanting to control the debate.

We just looked at some potentially disruptive technologies that fall outside the usual domain of the enterprise.

In this post, we'll look at some of the more near-term challenges facing the enterprise as seen by Constellation Research Group. In the first report from this newly formed consulting organization, co-founder R "Ray" Wang lists a set of five core disruptive technologies: social, mobile, cloud, analytics and unified communications. Together, these technologies could form a working definition of "enterprise 2.0." I'd add next-generation network and storage technology to that list and perhaps swap analytics with "big data," of which analytics is a subset, but these five serve as a good starting point.

In Constellation's Research Outlook For 2011, the consulting group's analyst team identifies generating business value as the core issue for enterprises taking advantage of its five listed core enterprise 2.0 technologies. To this end, the report identifies three main challenges for decision makers.

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few enterprise startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteEnterprise.

Podio is a highly customizable Web-based enterprise collaboration application. Like Huddle it emphasizes external collaboration as well as internal collaboration. Podio's distinguishing features are its large internal app store and its app builder. End-users can easily add or modify existing apps from the more than 2,000 apps available in the app store, or build new ones using a point and click interface.