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My former employer, BearingPoint, has recently launched newthinking.bearingpoint.com, a WordPress-powered blog seemingly open to all employees. This is a bold move as consulting companies typically guard their intellectual property with an iron first. But BearingPoint has been a leader when it comes to transparency. MIKE2, BearingPoint’s information management methodology, launched in 2005 and is “open source”, meaning it’s free for all to consume and contribute to, even competitors. The value to doing this is that BearingPoint capitalizes on the IM market taking business from rivals who would otherwise charge for the information that is free on MIKE2. And, while open, IM methodologies are complex to implement, and clients will be quick to select BearingPoint as their implementation vendor.Kudos to Nate and Jay, who must have played a huge role in getting thiew new blog rolled out. And check out this post from my buddy Sean (who’s getting married next month). Sean is an up and coming Enterprise 2.0 star at BearingPoint. I’m glad to see the new school is starting to have an impact on an otherwise traditional organization.

Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.

Did you know that MySQL enables Enterprise 2.0? I didn’t realize a database could do that.

MySQL defines Enterprise 2.0 as modern organizations implementing Web 2.0 technologies, architectures, and delivery models to offer browser-based, data-driven online applications to their business users.

Their definition focuses on the technical side of E2.0, but doesn’t acknowledge the cultural side of it. Regardless, it’s a stretch to say a database is an E2.0 enabler. A database is but one ingredient of the Enterprise 2.0 recipe. It’s how the cook mixes the ingredients that determines how good the food is.

A recent press release from businesswire.com highlights Mindtouch‘s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger). Mindtouch creates a product called Deki Wiki, an open source wiki and community platform. They make money by selling enterprise support subscriptions, a model that is increasing in popularity.

According to the press release, Mindtouch has seen a 100% increase in active installations (200,000 in total) since last year, and is being used by major organizations including FedEx, Microsoft, and EMC (made famous by Chuck Hollis who chronicled EMC’s adoption of Clearspace).

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Aaron Fulkerson is a pretty switched on guy, so I’m expecting Mindtouch to have more and more of an impact on the Enterprise 2.0 market as each quarter passes.

Only in San Francisco can you find advertising for open source software. SugarCRM is a popular open source Customer Relationship Management application. Good competitor to the likes of Siebel and Peoplesoft. I was walking in the lobby of a building in the financial district when I saw this. I must say it’s pretty cool to be in the land of technology and innovation.

Mediawiki is the popular, open source wiki application that powers wikipedia. Many organizations run mediawiki on their intranets including Avenue A Razorfish. One of the issues with the out of the box version of mediawiki is its categorization (or tagging) feature. Users are required to type the text “[Category:" followed by the category, then "]” (“[Category:design]“, for example) on the wiki page.

While this does not seem overly complicated it, becomes very difficult for users to reuse categories as there’s no feature on the edit page that shows them which categories have already been used. As a result, we might end up with two categories “design” and “designs” that should be the same.

A colleague of mine, Andreas Rindler, has solved this problem with a mediawiki Category Suggest extension.

CategorySuggest provides a Google Suggest like functionality to the edit page of articles. A separate “Categories” input box is added below the article page. When a user starts typing the name of an existing category, the extension retrieves a list of existing categories from the Mediawiki database and suggests matches to the user. The user can either type the name of a new extension or pick from the list of suggested categories.

Click over to his blog post describing the extension for a better overview.