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Forrester has released its 2010 The Forrester Wave: Community Platforms report by analyst Melissa Parrish. Jive and Lithium took top honors this year. Forrester also evaluated KickApps, Telligent Systems, and Mzinga. The firm concluded that those five vendors have the most mature products and have a lead on the rest of the crowded marketplace. The report focused on vendors providing externally facing community platforms, not internal collaboration suites.

IBM recently hosted a videocast on "The Social Workplace" featuring Dr. Jennifer Beal from the Center of Creative Leadership, Jennifer Okimoto from IBM Global Services, Sameer Patel of Sovos Group and Gen Y/millennial blogger Josip Petrusa. The group discussed generational differences in the workplace and enterprise collaboration.

LexisNexus recently conducted survey of white-collar workers in five countries (the United States, China, South Africa, United Kingdom and Australia) on the subject of information overload. According to the press release, the survey found most professionals have had an increase in information they must process since the economic downturn and that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all information they receive each day is irrelevant to their job. Also, 51% of workers spend half their work days managing and processing information rather than using that information to do their jobs. We asked last week about what enterprise 2.0 tools you use in your organizations. This week, we'd like to know how well those tools are working out for you.

Gartner released its 2010 Magic Quadrant for Workplace Social Software report this week. The same five vendors held onto the Leaders and Challengers quadrants, while the Visionaries and Niche Players quadrants thinned out. IBM, Jive and Microsoft remained the "Leaders" and Atlassian and OpenText remained the "Challengers." Several vendors dropped off the list completely. XWiki, a "Niche Player," was the only completely new vendor to make the cut.

Chalk another one up for the post-PC era: ADP recently launched RUN, a slick-looking mobile version of its popular payroll application. The app integrates with the desktop version of ADP's software and enables fiscal staff to: review and enter payroll, edit hours and pay rates, manage direct deposits, enter vacation and other time off, calculate taxes and more. Interestingly, ADP chose to release this for iOS before BlackBerry, but ADP is planning BlackBerry and Android versions by the end of the year. The free app may herald the future of enterprise computing dominated by mobile applications instead of desktop software.

Although many organizations are allowing users to buy their own devices, enterprises are still spending on company owned devices and phone plans. And many turn to device management solutions from companies like Good, MobileIron, Tangoe and Zenprise to manage both employee owned and company owned devices (see Top 10 Most Important Features for Enterprise Smartphone Management Solutions).

Tangoe offers not just device management, but telecom expense management and consulting. I recently talked with Tangoe CEO Al Subbloie about ways enterprises can save money on their mobile strategies. Some strategies benefit from using device management solutions like Tangoe, but others don't require any investment at all.

Adobe isn't a company that's typically thought of as an "enterprise software company," even though it sells its software to large enterprises and offers "enterprisey" products like Acrobat and LiveCycle. That could be changing.

Atlassian recently said it wants to be for technical teams what Adobe is to designers, but it's clear that Adobe wants to be to technical teams what it is to designers. Adobe announced several new products at its annual Max conference, including LiveCycle Mobile, the new BlackBerry SDK, HTML5 tools and its app distribution system InMarket. What's emerging is a full "Adobe Stack" for the enterprise.

Earlier today I linked to R. "Ray" Wang's post on the lack of innovation on the part of enterprise software vendors. One of the key trends Wang mentioned, and we've mentioned here as well, is the "consumerization" of IT. According to Wang, vendors are borrowing extensively from consumer technologies like Facebook for ideas. And most of the technologies we think of as "enterprise 2.0" have been around as enterprise products for some time now. So I'm curious: how many of you are actively using this stuff in your organizations today?

Altimeter Group analyst and co-founder R. "Ray" Wang, whom we quote often here, wrote a new post on enterprise technology trends. Most of them will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, but here's one that I think is worth highlighting: "Innovative Enterprises Push Forward Mostly On Their Own." Wang writes that most vendors are not innovating and that most enterprises at the Information Week 500 event "did not expect to gain market advantage from their existing and legacy vendors" (emphasis mine).

Google announced today that Google Apps Scripts, a "JavaScript cloud scripting language" for automating tasks in Google products, can now be embedded on any Google Sites page. Google Apps Script has been around for a while, but the ability to create custom pages with the scripts is new.