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Collaboration may be the hottest trend to hit the enterprise this year. But what makes it so hot? Why now?

According to "Benchmarking Your Collaboration Strategy,"
a new report from Forrester Research, two key trends make collaboration important to the enterprise right now:

The amount of content that people produce is morphing, especially as the advent of social computing becomes more commonplace.

A Forrester study reports that real-time collaboration has stalled in the enterprise due in most part to the lack of adoption in technologies such as web conferencing and instant messaging. That may be true with existing technologies but it is important to note the new generation of applications that extend real-time collaboration tools.

The State Of Workforce Technology Adoption by Forrester is definitely comprehensive in its examination of how people use technology in the workforce. It's a mass market report, meaning this is how people use technology today. They surveyed 2,001 "information workers" at organizations with 100 or more employees. It is Forrester's first report in this realm. It covers devices, productivity, mobility, collaboration, intranet portals and Web 2.0.

According to a new report by Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman Epps, eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, Rotman Epps predicts that later adopters will not feel the same loyalty towards Amazon. This, according to the report, will open up a lot of opportunities for other players in the market, including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

In a report covering web analytics from 2008 to the present day and forecasting the industry's future into 2014, tech research firm Forrester said this area is in an adolescent phase, working through critical changes and preparing for significant growth.

"Forrester forecasts that US businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in 2014, with an average compound annual growth rate of 17%," the report reads. "Growth will emerge from unexpected places as the value proposition of Web analytics technology oscillates for sophisticated analytics users and becomes more welcoming for new entrants. Ultimately, Web analytics will become part of a broader array of integrated services supporting marketers."

AOL, one of the largest national internet service providers and a global web services company, announced today that market research firm Forrester has rated it highest in "overall customer experience" in an independent study. Forrester conducted interviews with almost 4,600 people nationwide and found that AOL rated very high if not highest in categories such as usefulness and ease-of-use. When all the categories are combined, AOL was at the top with a 71% approval rating.

Analyst firm Forrester published a report this morning telling corporations that it's a good idea to engage bloggers in "sponsored conversations," or the exchange of goods or credit in exchange for blog coverage. The report, titled "Add Sponsored Conversations to Your Toolbox", is 8 pages long, focuses on a number of high profile examples like the case of KMart and Chris Brogan, and sells for $795.

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

A new report from Forrester Research predicts that mashups will be coming to the enterprise in a big way -- to the tune of a $700 million market by 2013. Mashup platforms that make it easier for consumer to create mashup applications, such as Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, or Microsoft Popfly, are beginning to have analogues in the enterprise space. "Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion's share of the market -- and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms," says Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young.

According to Forrester Research, there will be "strong demand" for web 2.0 tools in the enterprise in 2008. Even though 42% of enterprises say adding web 2.0 tools is not on their agenda, according to a Q3 2007 survey, Forrester expects that half of those will change their mind and embrace web 2.0 tools by year end. In the report "Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008," analyst Oliver Young gives three reasons why he thinks 2008 is the year that "IT departments will take their heads out of the sand and embrace web 2.0 technologies."