There’s been a lot of noise about online collaboration tools / Enterprise 2.0 / Knowledge Management, and we have seen a lot of products in the space. There are players ranging from the traditional Enterprise tools vendors like IBM and Microsoft with all encompassing heavy products, to a bunch of start-ups with their wares trying to get a share of the pie by solving a piece of the problem. The following is a list of a few tools in the Enterprise 2.0 space:

Sharepoint by Microsoft
Lotus Connections by IBM
SocialText (A ‘social wiki’ wiki with sharepoint integration)
ConnectBeam (Social Bookmarking that integrates with search)
Atlassian (Enterprise wiki with a lot of social features)
and many others

While Sharepoint is a last generation tool in its AJAX-y avatar, IBM’s product and those by the start-ups are true blue web 2.0 products which supposedly adhere to the web2.0 tenets of openness, sharing and usability and attemp to bring them to how people collaborate at workplaces. Such a tool can, potentially, help an enterprise:

1. Unlock knowledge hidden in day to day interactions
2. Make knowledge available for later use which would otherwise have been lost
3. Discover people with expertise
4. Promote retention, cohesion within the work place

While the potential use cases of these tools are very interesting, enterprise wide adoption and utility is something that I think is still to be proven. I would really like the inputs from the community here about their experience with using these or similar tools. Maybe we can have the discussion around the following points:

1. Which tool have you tried, and what have been the benefits.
2. How has the adoption been? How keen are employees to leave their previous ways of interacting, and shift to these collaboration tools?
3. Do you have a wish-list of features that you would like to see in a collaboration tool for your workplace?

And of course, anything else that you might want to add.

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