Jerry Bowles did an excellent set of Five Predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007 last week. This post is a follow up on one of his predictions, “The Empire will strike back. IBM and Microsoft will jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon in a big way…” I agree with his forecast, at least this first part. The rest could easily happen, also, if the firms are not careful. Both IBM and Microsoft have been laying the foundation for their entry into Enterprise 2.0 for some time. Here is a bit on what IBM is doing and I will do a briefer post on what Microsoft is doing in a few days.

On the disclosure side, I have no current business relationship with IBM but it has been a client on a number of occasions over the past 20 years. During this time I have both agreed and disagreed with their decisions. Recently, I interviewed a number of people at IBM Research for several articles on their Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 activities. In November 2005 I attended a press event where some of these efforts were introduced. Here is a post, IBM shows del.icio.us for the enterprise, and more, by Dave Weinberger who also attended the event and an article by Matt Hines of eWeek, IBM Sets Its Sights on Social Networking Tools, The first two tools below were covered in this event. The third came out later. I have only read about and, in some cases, seen demos of these tools so I can only comment on the concepts. I am very interested in others’ comments and observations, as well as anyone with real experience with these tools or other IBM Enterprise 2.0 related efforts.

Dogear was one of the first social bookmarking applications created for use behind the fire wall. It gives you tagging capability combined with authentication of the tagger. Your corporate directory presence can also have your tags (as well as your blogs). You can see others within your firm with the same bookmarks. Bookmarks can be public (behind the firewall) or private. RSS is available for any public bookmarking. Here is a comprehensive article, Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, by the three creators, David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr. IBM plans to make this a product.

Unified Activity Management is a platform that allows you to combine applications along the lines of workflows. Both this tool and the next one are aligned, at least conceptually with George Dearing’s post on this blog, When Will The Enterprise 2.0 Workflow Take Hold? As the IBM web site states, “The goal of the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project is to recast collaboration technologies in terms of the meaningful business activities in which people are engaged, both to support the work of each individual person and team and — more significantly — the enterprise. This includes both formal elements such as workflows and structured documents, as well as informal collaboration such as chats and emails that is so critical to getting the work done.” It looks at work from an activity perspective and lets you chart business process (e.g. responding to an RFP) and associated best practices. You drag in documented sub-steps from other processes to improve your process. You can find work process related documents and people.

Activity Explorer is another workflow related tool described as an Activity centric collaboration product that emerged from IBM Research. With Activity Explorer, participants create activity threads that link divergent data sources and tools to support a task and provide context. It blends synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. There are also different views of the progress of the activity. It has search, RSS, and tagging. The effort is summarized in the paper, Activity Explorer: Activity-centric collaboration from research to product that I heard about from Tomoaki Sawada. Their goal, like that of Unified Activity Management, to “reorganize collaboration to reflect the work being done rather than the technologies that support the work.” An enhanced version of Activity Explorer was announced as a component of Lotus Notes Version 7 in October 2006.