Two years ago Dion Hinchcliffe asked the question “Can web 2.0 be adapted to the Enterprise”. Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business school had then just coined the term Enterprise 2.0 which revolved around enabling ad-hoc collaboration via freeform, emergent and social software for potential outcomes. Today, new age technologies are being crafted for enterprise use and are being adopted by businesses to increase productivity and improve collaboration amongst employees. Enterprise 2.0 technologies enable Collaboration using wikis, blogs, tagging systems, RSS, discussion forums, instant messaging, search and more making the collective intelligence of an organization accessible increasing innovation, innovation, productivity and agility. At the core, these technologies aim at interconnecting employees with other employees, partners, customers and business knowledge; gradually becoming mission critical to the success of the businesses. So, How do I use these Enterprise 2.0 technologies to help my business? Andrew McAfee lists 8 ways as to how these infrastructures can be used to benefit businesses:

1. For Collaborative Document production - Wikis
2. To build an encyclopedia – Knowledge Repositories
3. As an All-purpose teamware
4. As a war room for fast-changing situations
5. For Knowledge Broadcast - Blogs
6. For broadcast search
7. For crowdsourcing
8. To express collective judgment

Together these technologies can be best applied and consumed in the company intranet that can behave as a unified platform for employees to work together, exchange knowledge and gain from other’s experiences. Enter Intranet 2.0. Intranets for long have been document centric. But documents and content are useless without knowing who created it, why was it created and how was it used. Employees need to be able to search for people, expertise, previously created information easily to increase productivity. Intranets 2.0 enable an open environment that encourages user participation and empowers employees to help create and organize the information they need, effectively. Cyn.in adapts these Web 2.0 philosophies and concepts to create an offering focusing on enterprise requirements and benefit areas. Cyn.in becomes an extension of your workplace, making it easy for people to connect, share ideas, store project information, review documents, discuss and make quick decisions. I'd love to know how your business is using an Enterprise 2.0 technology to benefit your business productivity.

328 information technology and business executives & managers took a survey conducted by CIO.com about adoption of open source technologies in their companies. More than half the respondents; 53% said that they are already using open source applications in their organizations, today. 45% revealed that the primary reason to not use open-source software at their company has been due to Product support concerns! Awareness or knowledge that an open-source application that solves their requirement exists is lacking according to 29%. While 26% have security concerns and 22% lack support by management. About a quarter of corporations 27% have a formal policy in place regarding open-source applications, though 18% expect to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months Although they have full control over the code, enterprises clearly want assurance that someone will answer tech support calls. Companies offering open source need to convince their enterprise prospects that their software is backed by extensive support. Support could be offered in various ways via mail, forums, phone, online support ticketing systems or even IM. Companies need to create special pages on their website informing prospects about the various support offerings, increase awareness of the benefits of the application and the problems it solves. This will greatly help the enterprises to adopt high-value yet freely available open source technologies.

Greatest Barriers to Open-Source Software Adoption at Your Company?

Source: CIO.com survey of 328 IT and business executives and managers, April 2008. Up to three items selected.

	Percentage
Product support concerns	45%
Awareness/knowledge of available solutions	29%
Security concerns	26%
Lack of support by management	22%
Licensing or legal concerns	21%
Investment in architecture from other vendor(s)	20%
Software quality issues	20%
Customization concerns	15%
Not relevant to our product or service	7%
Pressure on open-source providers by commercial vendors	5%
Software cost allocation policies	2%
Other	9%

Mass adoption of open source technologies in the Enterprises, will be a great success for the community. The requirements of the enterprises and businesses is very clear from the survey results. It is now the responsibility of the open source software providers to spread the revolution by providing reliable support and increasing awareness.