Microsoft, others push new 2.0 wares

This year's Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston, getting underway Monday, will see a flurry of product announcements from large platform vendors as well as a teeming pool of start-ups and smaller companies. Among the news:

-- Hoping to evoke a sense of momentum around its SharePoint collaboration and content management platform, Microsoft will announce Monday that roughly 10 vendors in the Enterprise 2.0 space have integrated their products with it. They include Atlassian, maker of an enterprise wiki, and WorkLight, which will enable SharePoint Server users to "securely view and update information from SharePoint Server through familiar consumer tools such as Windows Vista gadgets and Facebook applications," according to a statement.

-- In addition, Microsoft will unveil its Podcasting Kit for SharePoint on Monday, an open-source project built with SharePoint Server and the company's Silverlight technology for rich media and applications. The toolkit can be used for creating and distributing podcasts to any devices that can play them, according to a statement. It also incorporates instant-messaging and social-networking features such as rating systems and tag clouds.

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This year's Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston, getting underway Monday, will see a flurry of product announcements from large platform vendors as well as a teeming pool of start-ups and smaller companies. Among the news:

-- Hoping to evoke a sense of momentum around its SharePoint collaboration and content management platform, Microsoft will announce Monday that roughly 10 vendors in the Enterprise 2.0 space have integrated their products with it. They include Atlassian, maker of an enterprise wiki, and WorkLight, which will enable SharePoint Server users to "securely view and update information from SharePoint Server through familiar consumer tools such as Windows Vista gadgets and Facebook applications," according to a statement.

-- In addition, Microsoft will unveil its Podcasting Kit for SharePoint on Monday, an open-source project built with SharePoint Server and the company's Silverlight technology for rich media and applications. The toolkit can be used for creating and distributing podcasts to any devices that can play them, according to a statement. It also incorporates instant-messaging and social-networking features such as rating systems and tag clouds.

-- Startup GroupSwim is launching a pair of products, GroupSwim Forums and GroupSwim Collaboration. The first is meant for a company's customers and the latter for use by teams within enterprises. The company's on-demand offering uses NLP (natural language processing) to automatically organize and rate user-generated content.

-- Another social-networking platform startup, Socialcast, will announce that users can now opt to plug a number of external Web sources, such as the Twitter messaging system, into its application.

-- In a similar move, the new version of Serena Software's Mashup Composer will enable users to create what it is calling "rich interface mashups" by combining data from internal business applications, such as CRM (customer relationship management) systems, with consumer Web feeds and services.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.