Browsing through InfoWorld's list of the best open source (and freeware) software for 2008, I naturally zeroed in on the list of collaboration tools. However other than Elgg, a social networking platform, the rest of the social software winners are the typical list of suspects for blogging and wikis, e.g. Wordpress and Mediawiki. As a side note, personally I wouldn't automatically pick Mediawiki as the best option for your organisation without understanding some of your key requirements - e.g the technical platform you want to run it on, security needs, etc.
The enterprise applications space offers a much more interesting selection, if only because of the diverse range of enterprise functions covered. With the exception of email and calendaring (listed under the collaboration category), the enterprise applications category includes tools for BI, BPM, CRM, ECM, ERP, Portals, Project Management and Reporting. If you aren't currently using open source, then certainly no one can argue you don't have a choice of where to dip your toe into the open source water!
However, on reflection I noticed the list has quite a few areas missing that might interest me, such as:
- Tools to help with findability, like search and tagging;
- Enterprise RSS;
- Mashing;
- Instant messaging and persistent chat; and
- Microblogging.
Any suggestions anyone?
BTW I would be really interested to talk anyone in my part of the world who is making use of open source enterprise collaboration and business applications.
Good post and thanks for the great link. I work at a large consulting organisation and we are heavy users of open source software. We use Mediawiki as our global wiki and Drupal for our new Knowledge management platform. We have Elgg installed, but it's not really used. We have Wordpress installed for internal blogs, but are gradually moving over towards Drupal for blogs.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, we are using Drupal for our community collaboration software (although not really in your part of the world!)
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