Indie 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 means the application of Web 2.0 tools in larger businesses. While smaller businesses (SMEs) can use hosted ASP tools for business, a la Backpack, large enterprises need more robust, secure and customized tools with fuller feature sets and customizability. There’s a whole slew of tools in this rapidly expanding space, e.g.,

• Sharepoint (predicted by Forrester to “steamroll” other enterprise Web 2.0 apps in 2008)
• A couple interesting ones a progressive CIO I met with the other day is implementing:
  • Attensa (RSS feeds of activities in your business you care about)
  • K2 blackpearl which “gives users the tools to design, assemble, execute, monitor and optimize dynamic business applications”

But as a big fan of Eric Raymond, I’m especially interested in open source Enterprise 2.0 tools, a couple interesting looking ones which I’ve come across in the last week:

• Liferay Portal, a a Java-based open source enterprise portal and content management system (CMS). InfoQ has a post on on Liferay’s latest release.
• Intalio is a “business process mapping” (BPM) tool. And BPM is a very hot topic these days. Most BPM tools I have used (e.g., ARIS, for SAP) are not very useful because a)the diagrams produced from them tell very little to people untrained in the methodology (thus it’s hard to get validation from business process owners themselves); b)the “to be” diagrams don’t tie back very well to the software. Intalio aims to overcome this–their methodology is so different, they call it “BPM 2.0″. They use BPEL4People, which seems very promising to me, and, in lay people’s terms, what the business analyst designs as a “to be” business process, can then be quickly and easily built using Intalio’s Designer, Server and Workflow modules. The tools build are AJAXy, SOA-ish Web 2.0 tools–as is even the way of interacting with the tools apparently.