Stories by C.G. Lynch

By writing blogs as if they were press releases, corporate blogs, often written by executives, have failed to capture their intended audiences in any meaningful way, Forrester says

Using a wiki from Socialtext, a social software vendor, CoActive, a New York-based marketing firm, has been able to take critical work out of e-mail boxes and put it into one transparent, searchable portal

Mozilla has touted Firefox 3 as faster and more secure than earlier versions of the open-source web browser. But there's another reason to look at the browser upgrade: it is highly customizable for individual users by utilizing the massive library of Add-ons - additional features that users can choose to install on top of the browser.

A survey of 500 businesses concluded that 69 per cent of companies have less than half of their data discoverable by enterprise search tools. Such tools can help end-users find files, data and other content in enterprise systems, applications, and document repositories.

Microsoft confirmed rumors that it has been developing a Facebook-like platform for the enterprise known as TownSquare, according to a report by Computerworld. While it's not hard to imagine how Microsoft could incorporate it into the SharePoint platform, a lot of its success will depend on how companies utilize enterprise social networks moving forward.

IBM and Microsoft showed off their social software for businesses at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in a three hour session meant to compare and contrast their offerings.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston will be attended by an interesting mix of vendors, IT practitioners and analysts involved in making Web 2.0 technologies suitable for businesses. While Forrester estimated that the Enterprise 2.0 software market would reach $4.6 billion, it is still a maturing market, and here are three things I hope to see next week:

When Google launched its web-based e-mail service (Gmail) on April 1, 2004, many people thought it was an April Fool's Day joke, and perhaps with good reason. That same day, the company had posted plans to open a research facility on the moon.

As budgets become tighter, the need to get IT people off pesky maintenance issues so they can drive innovative projects becomes more essential, making software as a service (SaaS) offerings an even more compelling option for CIOs.

As applications found on the Web let end-users collaborate without needing IT's help or blessing, Microsoft has contended that SharePoint will be the "destination" platform that gives employees what they want and IT the management features necessary to running a business. Whether SharePoint turns out this way, however, is another matter altogether.

In early March, during an annual conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced it was launching Microsoft Office SharePoint Online. While the idea was to provide a lightweight version of SharePoint as a hosted offering, analysts say the product has been presented in a way to avoid cannibalizing Microsoft's bread-and-butter installed software product, Office.

Just like traditional enterprise software will be phased out because it ignores innovations in the consumer space and the realities of how people actually work, Facebook won't be nearly as important or valuable as people think unless companies develop more business-oriented widgets that can run atop the fastest growing social network.

As more businesses (and their employees) access software over the Web, the amount of tabs we have open throughout the day on our Web browsers continues to increase. While RSS feed readers, bookmarking services, and portals like iGoogle pages are helpful, we all need something better or we'll become overwhelmed.

Many enterprise IT leaders could learn something from a keynote talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco with Steve Pearman, senior vice president of Product Strategy at MySpace: all technological innovations at MySpace generally come from users of the service, or at least win their approval first.

Though Google believes ubiquitous internet connectivity will phase out the need to work on the desktop, Dion Almaer, an engineer at Google, says the company hopes developers will continue to utilize Google Gears, an open set of APIs, to make rich internet applications (RIAs) work better offline at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.