"We bring the power of Web 2.0 external facing communities to SharePoint," said Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing and sales at Awareness. "You'd like your SharePoint users to participate in communities without having to log into that community directly.When you look at places like Facebook or LinkedIn, a lot of what make those sites very popular is the connectivity they provide between people -- being able to form a group of people I care about or maintaining a status online of what I'm doing."
Using the Awareness software, community administrators can build structured social areas with security and customization or users can create ad-hoc social areas that other users can join by invitation or request.
Also, NewsGator Technologies will announce the general availability of Social Sites 2.0, an upgrade of its social computing technology for SharePoint. The new software allows users to create ad hoc communities and supports the easy discovery of these groups through customized recommendations, tag clouds, search and lists of recently created or popular communities, NewsGator said. In addition, the tool provides employees with a social graph -- a list of their connections within the company based on factors like common interests, common community membership and common RSS subscriptions, said Laura Farrelly, NewsGator's director of marketing.
"The system will recommend me to colleagues who are very similar to me," Farrelly noted. "The benefit is to be able to quickly discover people who are like me or work on similar projects. In a large company I may not even know ... someone is working to try to solve the same problem I am."
Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research who focuses on Enterprise 2.0, noted that last year's conference included lots of analysts, vendors and pundits talking to each other. "This year we're going to see a lot more end user companies, a lot more businesses who are really trying to make use of those tools to join that conversation."
Organizations including Wachovia, Federal Express and the Central Intelligence Agency are scheduled to speak at the conference about their adoption of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise as part of the transition to Enterprise 2.0.
Oliver said social networking and mashups are two of the main areas currently piquing corporate interest.
"I see the main value proposition with mashups is the idea that IT is actually a bottleneck in a lot of cases where all the little application projects, the little integration projects never get the time devoted to them," Young said. "Mashups for many are becoming a way to solve those problems. It is something that desperately needs to be solved."
Boeing, for example, is using IBM's Mashup Center -- which shipped last week -- as part of a demonstration project with the US Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security that looks to support interagency operations through the use of a network-enabled infrastructure.
"We found that there were situations where [agencies] needed capabilities that in many cases you don't know you need them until you need them," said Paul Comitz, program manager for Boeing's Network Enabled Operations Demonstration. "The mashup technology is a nice match for that sort of scenario. It provides the capability to combine existing data and services and create unique lightweight network-enabled applications."