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

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.

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.

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.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.

Avenue A Razorfish is now evolving their wiki to include more features. I’d like to direct you to their blog post which contains an embedded slideshare presentation that explains their approach. They’ve definitely got some great ideas.

But in doing my research on open source options, it strikes me as odd that no one has created an open source E2.0 application that integrates Mediawiki (wiki), WordPress (blogging), bbPress (discussion), elgg (social networking) and scuttle (social bookmarking). All of these are PHP-based and open source, so integrating them would seem like an obvious thing to do.

I know that Avenue-A-Razorfish has tweaked Mediawiki to integrate more E2.0 features, but it doesn’t seem that they’ve released the fruits of their effort to the public.

The technical challenge to overcome with integration of disparate applications would be:

• Single Sign-on: Users login once and are then logged in to each application
• Integrated Tags: Each application has its own concept of tag. Tags need to be shared.
• Look and Feel: Styles and themes need to be the same across the suite to give the appearance of cohesiveness.
• I’m sure there are more…

Spikesource did something similar with Suite Two which is worth checking out if you haven’t already.
Maybe I’ll rise to the challenge, brush up on my PHP programming skills, and give it a shot.

I then started to wonder if the recent discontinuation of free Skypeout calls in North America (which was replaced by an unlimited plan) was perhaps a precursor to trends we might see happen in the opensource space. Is opensource just a fad? Are opensource software providers going to disappear and be replaced by low-cost software companies? Time will tell but there are signs that are not so optimistic, like “wikipedia’s funding woes“, for example.