Collaboration 2.0

In these economically troubled times, the content management vendors have managed to jump onto something rather tangible that might help them sell more products. Basically, give your staff tools to help them collaborate better and somewhere along the line it'll benefit your bottom line. Or that's the way the story is usually told.
So we had Alfresco and RedDot launching new products last week, the latter of course in the web content management space and the former probably the best known open source ECM vendor around, which has been gaining pretty impressive adoption in the enterprise space. Although RedDot has been criticised by some of the analysts for failing to innovate at the pace required by its customers, maybe since its acquisition by ECM giant OpenText, its new Web Solutions Suite ticks most of the right boxes.
The main message behind the release seems to be to let firms harness the power of Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis on their internally and externally facing sites, while retaining the vital enterprise control over content that often puts companies off the brave new world of Web 2.0. So it's about encouraging collaboration on intranets and extranets but giving IT administrators vitally the final say over what content goes where, which is important for your compliance efforts.
Alfresco has released Enterprise Edition 3.0, which is focused a great deal not on the web side but on document collaboration, although it also draws heavily on Web 2.0 features and ideals. The most interesting, and judging by initial feedback on the product, the most popular, feature is Alfresco Share, which allows users to capture, share and retrieve information. It's also got handy functionality for creating virtual teams for projects, and a neat Facebook-like activity feed feature, which allows users to see who's doing what in a project and if there are any important updates.
The key, according to the firm, was to democratise the process of collaborative content management, which is I guess the holy grail for ECM vendors - putting the tools in the hands of the business end users, so that costly, timely, inefficient IT inteference is minimised. If we're getting nearer to that promised land then it's just in time for firms, as we all look to wring the most productivity we can from our existing human resources.