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Is there anyone among us that like org charts? Do I see any hands? Bueller?

Maybe they are a necessarily evil. Maybe they are these artifacts that are instantly obsolete; once drawn they clarify how wrong-headed an organization's structure is and are therefore can have some curative powers. Maybe they are good for those among us that like hierarchies and definitive reporting relationships, and who start to shiver at the words "dotted line reporting." Or maybe it is just fun to see whom reports to whom and how other companies are so messed up.

You probably don't know that IBM sells a social media and community building tool that competes with Socialtext and Jive and combines wikis, social streams, discussion forums and integrates with IBM's Sametime for presence/IM communications. It is called Connections and today IBM announced that mobile versions of Connections are free to download. This is a good thing, because their pricing was driving me batty. The software that has more options than your father's Oldsmobile, and trying to find the right place to learn about it on IBM's Web site isn't easy either. (Try starting here.)

What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.

This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.

Socialtext today announced three enhancements to its microblogging and enterprise social networking platform to help visualize and maintain workflows.

Having grown up during the transition from mainframes to PCs and worked in IT when we were first installing PCs, I find it amusing to see how people return now and then to the topic of collaboration in the Internet and SaaS era. Last month media pundit Jeff Jarvis weighed in with his comments here. Notably, he says:

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.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, may think email's dying, but until it's dead it's still the incumbent monarch of enterprise communication. Tools that don't fit seamlessly into existing processes and workflows will hinder the adoption of next-generation enterprise collaboration solutions. eTouch's enterprise-grade wiki SamePage attempts to solve this problem by allowing users to create wiki pages via email, and several other features to ease adoption.

Zoho updated its Zoho Wiki to version 2.0 today, adding features such as granular access controls and the ability to create individual workspaces for different business units, departments, or teams. This represents a shift in Zoho's positioning of the product from a simple app to an enterprise-level platform for intranets, knowledge bases and collaboration.

For many branches of the U.S. military, it's the year to bring Web 2.0 inside the war room. Flagship experiments in many a division are using open source wiki software like MediaWiki and MindTouch.

In both free and paid deployments, these collaborative networks are proving to be a favorite testing ground for a new way to manage the knowledge of soldiers. In some ways, these rigidly hierarchical organizations are displaying an real willingness to experiment, compared to the civilian businesses declaring themselves enterprise 2.0.

Five years ago Lee LeFever was an online community manager for a B2B healthcare company called Solucient. Today, his voice has been heard by millions of people around the world, making strange new applications feel easy to use and offering some of the clearest explanations of how the Internet is changing.

LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one.