Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration products will "continue to steamroll the [enterprise Web 2.0] market" in 2008, despite taking heat from some observers about SharePoint's wiki, blog and social networking functionality, Forrester analysts say.

Continued success for Microsoft was one of nine predictions Forrester made for the enterprise Web 2.0 market in 2008 in a report that says the implementation of Web 2.0 software will be a priority for 24% of businesses over the next year.

SharePoint users have sometimes found basic Web 2.0 features difficult to use, and complain about a lack of advanced features commonly found in best-of-breed products, such as tools that let you build lightweight applications on top of a wiki, says Forrester analyst and report lead author Oliver Young.

These concerns won't limit adoption rates of SharePoint, though, he says.

"IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments will look at SharePoint first," Young writes. "While the rest of the market – analysts included – will continue to gripe about SharePoint in 2008, Microsoft is clearly in an enviable position and can afford to wait for the market to come to it."

Microsoft has answered concerns about SharePoint's Web 2.0 functionality by releasing a social networking tool pack and partnering with vendors such as Socialtext and Atlassian to plug advanced functionality into SharePoint, Young says. IT shops have to pay more for that extra functionality provided through partnerships, he says.

Young says he expects major Web 2.0 upgrades in the next version of SharePoint, whenever that is released, but for now says Microsoft executives have given customers "the best solution that they can." (Learn more about collaboration products in our Collaboration Buyer's Guide.) 

Here are some more of Forrester's Web 2.0 predictions for 2008, based partly on a survey of enterprises and small businesses in North America and Europe (fellow industry watcher Gartner also issued predictions this week):

* Web 2.0 will make it big in the enterprise. "CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees' use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead," Young writes.