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Colligo Networks has long built some of the most best-known desktop applications for Microsoft SharePoint. The Colligo Contributor software suite lends offline access and an interface that's definitely easier to handle.

But with the 4.0 release of Contributor scheduled to ship on July 13th, they've expanded the suite's capabilities with a pair of tools that touch the core of SharePoint's capabilities: a new file manager and an uploader for Outlook. Other features incorporated in to 4.0 include an enhanced SDK, one-click attachments, and drag-and-drop control of folders.

While the additions to Colligo Contributor may not exactly be on the bleeding edge of enterprise software, they're something that's likely to be fairly indispensable for the legion of organizations still tied to SharePoint.

Today at DEMO09, a company called cc:Betty launched their new smart email service which creates "mailspaces" for your email conversations. These online sites serve as a home for your email discussions, functioning somewhat like a SharePoint site or a Google Group, but far more robust and much easier to create. The collaborative workspaces are populated with the email conversations themselves as well as images, videos, audio files, and more all retrieved from within the email thread. Most importantly, they can be created on-the-fly. All you need to do is "cc: Betty."

Businesses and established organizations are vastly different environments than the Web 2.0 social networking-centric universe. Where Web 2.0 is all about sharing information and engaging in two-way conversations, the enterprise concerns itself, in part, with individuals who are guarded with information and an organizational structure that disseminates information in top-down fashion. From my experience of evangelizing the benefits of social media at a mid-sized civil engineering company, I have learned many lessons on how the enterprise regards and judges social media.

Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. I certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. Let's look at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The new surge in Enterprise 2.0 technologies is giving companies, especially small-to-medium sized businesses, more alternatives when it comes to company intranet portals for team collaboration and project management. In fact, it has taken those portals, once only available behind the firewall, and put them online as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. One such SaaS portal for information sharing among company employees launches today at DEMO08: Qtask, a project-centric collaboration environment.

Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, has just announced Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their latest release, Confluence 2.9. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead.

Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft's well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools - like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions - that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.

Nine companies are saying "yes," having recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology.

If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception.

There was once an era when website content could only be changed by wrestling time away from someone who specialized in such technical matters. Blogging changed all of that. Applications too, were once the exclusive domain of technical specialists - but a new generation of services is changing that today as well. In the consumer space services like Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, Feedity now make the creation of simple and composite applications something that a far greater number of power-users can do for themselves.

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."