I'm a big believer in 'eating your own dog food' and I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds, forums and social networking sites to keep up with my areas of interest.

I've just been reading a forum thread on 'Do Enterprises WANT social networking?', there are plenty of experts in the field putting their views across which is excellent. The thread is part of the 'Social Networking in the Enterprise' Facebook group. There is just over 1000 members and it's growing rapidly, originally headed up by Mike Gannotti who's SharePoint blog is well within the top 10 feed reads for me with some amazing content around this space and also SharePoint.

There is a lot of related links included around web3.0 and the semantic web. Notably the SIOC project which interlinks blogs, forums, wikis and mailing lists into one database and an alternative here at OpenLink Virtuoso.

This article on 'Enterterprise Expertise Management Systems and Organisational Reality' also offers some great scenarios of the use of Enterprise2.0 in real life situations.

The key takeaway was that is seems to revolve a lot around getting Generation Y engaged within and organisation in a collaborative way in large scale enterprises across globally separated locations.

Another key point was that a lot of organisations have this on their road map but other requirements take priorities such as upgrades etc.

A suggestion was to attack it from a problem focus rather than a product focus where the key is to getting it in the door. So from a problem focus, introduce Enterprise2.0 by resolving the current internal issue of finding an expert in 'x' field.

Another strong link explained enterprise2.0 in a good way covering a few key areas also:

• Integration between enterprise2.0 applications such as wikis and web content management systems. There is a big stream of decisions being made around what integrates with what. So announcements like SocialText and Atlassian integration with SharePoint are key moves for these vendors.
• It also indicates all the vendors that are out there in the enterprise2.0 space and the main market they are targetting e.g. Media Industry, SME, Intranet, Extranet, Education etc.
• It mentions what the big players are doing such as IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle and SalesForce are doing.
• It highlights the clear link between Instant Messaging and Enterprise 2.0 and therefore the drive for Unified Communications being pushed by Cisco and Microsoft among others. Cisco is definately playing catchup compared to the application integration that Microsoft can show at this point in time, but it won't be long before acquisitions and internal development keep them in the game in this UC race.

It also links to this article on facebook in the enterprise and where it's going. Key points of interest were:

• There are lots of business focused groups already out there on facebook
• Employees think that others give out too much information about themselves on line openly
• LinkedIn has issues around employees using it for job searches as well as for connections with internal and external people.
• Some online enterprise2.0 providers are creating controlled hosted closed networks to prevent links to external sources and to save hosting them internally which is increasing rapidly. Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live Workspaces are good examples of this also.