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The possibility of a natural disaster affecting your company's IT infrastructure is very real. You have to be prepared. In this brief, Qwest provides an overview for how to plan, implement and execute a quick recovery strategy if disaster ever does strike.

Google's mapping tools - namely Google Earth and Google Maps - are among its most successful consumer-facing products. Google Earth alone has been downloaded more than 700,000,000 times. But the company today is aiming to expand the reach of those services by targeting the enterprise market with a brand new tool: Google Earth Builder.

The new product will let companies upload, process and store their geospatial data in the Google cloud. As it utilizes the popular Google Maps and Google Earth tools, Earth Builder will enable users to share and publish mapping data without requiring any technical expertise or GIS training.

We've discovered several more vendors since we first looked at the enterprise questions and answers space earlier this year. It's a young market, but one that's heating up quick. There are pure Q&A vendors like the ones we mentioned before, and several other social platforms have added Q&A features to existing products.

Here's a look at nine companies that are trying to improve knowledge management through Q&A software.

We'll start a three-part series next week that explores how community is changing in the enterprise.

The three elements that we will be addressing in the series are external communities, internal communities and the relevance of communities to the cloud.

Ron Shulkin, VP of the Americas at CogniStreamer, recently wrote a blog post titled "Trust me: You do NOT want to go through your company's idea list manually." Shulkin makes the case against using a basic electronic idea box for ideation, or shoehorning ideas into existing tools, instead of an application dedicated to managing ideas.

"Without a proper mechanism for automatic idea promotion, someone is going to end up with a thousand ideas on their desk and have to filter them manually," Shulkin writes. "They'll have to read them all, sort through them, put them into categories, combine similar ones, somehow score them, rank them and decide which ones are the best." The result is that the person in charge of filtering through all these ideas won't be able to do a very good job, good ideas won't be implemented and people will be discouraged from submitting ideas.

How do you gather ideas at work? Are you using an idea management platform, dropping ideas into a box, or dealing with it all through e-mail or a forum?

eXo offers an open source Java framework for enterprise social software tools. It includes reusable components for building content management systems, user management tools, activity streams, e-mail integrations, mashups and more.

This week it announced Cloud IDE, a Web-based development environment for cloud applications.

Starting now, Google is rolling out a new commenting system to all Google Docs users except those Google Apps customers who opt-out through the new system we told you about yesterday. The company expects to have the new feature fully deployed by the end of the day.

Google is attempting to address a common document collaboration problem: how to manage comments and conversations around a document. "Document comments aren't really conducive to a conversation," says Google Docs Group Product Manager Scott Johnston. "So we end up having conversations in e-mail instead." But when you use e-mail, conversations end up separate from the document. And sometimes those conversations are as important as the document itself.

So how is Google trying to solve this problem?

Seesmic and Yammer announced today a plugin that brings Yammer's enterprise microblogging and social networking tool to Seesmic's desktop social media application. In addition to making Yammer more appealing to companies that also use external social media, the integration helps Seesmic differentiate itself from other social media dashboards by offering more internal collaboration options.

Seesmic users can download the plugin from the marketplace section of the Seesmic Desktop app. The Seesmic Web client and various mobile clients do not yet have Yammer support.

Earlier today we told you about HP's new strategy focused on software and cloud-services. This is a departure for HP, which is mostly known as a hardware company but which has been steadily moving into IT services for the past few years. New CEO Leo Apotheker brings several years of enterprise software experience to the company from SAP, but HP's past isn't promising.

Also, I recently read this article by RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady: "How Important is Software? Generational Differences Between Software Producers." O'Grady tracks the recent history of software considers whether software has become so commodified that it no longer confers a strategic advantage. If this is the case, then is becoming a software company really what HP should do?

Last week we told you that enterprises are investing more into business intelligence and analytics initiatives. This week there's more good news for professionals in this area: according to KDNuggets, salaries are rising for analytics and data mining professionals.

Based on a poll with approximately 250 respondents, KDNuggets found that salaries are up from its 2010 poll in North America, Western Europe, Asia and Latin America. (There is no mention of Eastern Europe, Africa or Antarctica.)

It's a good time to be a geek, particularly one with a background in statistics, analytics and data mining. But a bad time to be almost any other type of worker.