The central threads of Web 2.0 such as blogs, wikis, user-generated content, bookmarking, social networking groups are not just providing the wiring for the social web, but are also beginning to make their presence felt in enterprises too. We expect that businesses will embrace Web 2.0 in a big way in 2008. Early adopters of Enterprise 2.0, as it’s called, are infusing a new life into intranets and corporate websites with these Web 2.0 tools.

Web 2.0 tools have the power to create truly collaborative work environments and make the concept of extended enterprises a reality. While there has been a lot of talk about Enterprise 2.0, the adoption has so far been seen only by few enterprises. However, the success of early adopters, and the tangible benefits of Web 2.0 will result in a larger adoption by enterprises in 2008.

Web 2.0 Tools Effort Pyramid

At the base of the effort pyramid are the blogs – many companies have their principal officers run internal/external blogs.

As an external tool that plugs into a corporate marketing website, blogs are an excellent tool for thought leadership positioning. The Infosys telecom blog 'Livewire' is a case in point – it has a nice blend of fresh takes on technology applications, some analyses, some technology future-gazing, all delivered in a personal style that is the very essence of a blog.

We are seeing more companies using blogs as a tool for influencing and marketing. In particular, product companies – in technology or otherwise – will use blogs for encouraging users to post reviews and experiences.

Another tool that's fairly simply to integrate into an existing web presence are RSS feeds. We will see more companies hooking up dynamic sections like Jobs/Press Releases.

Moving up the ladder, we come to networking tools. Extremely successful in drawing in users and one of the few Web 2.0 tools that's quite ubiquitous in India, networking can be tapped in two ways. The first and possibly the most rewarding is the creation of user communities for customers - this is particularly relevant for product companies. A moderated community that can actually share product usage experience and data is a self-sustaining marketing tool. In addition it's a great platform to promote new product releases, for organising user trainings, and even for getting advance feedback for under-construction features. Given the return on investment, we foresee a lot of companies launching online customer communities in the coming year.

Another interesting way of using networking is to create official online alumni groups - provided of course, the bulk of the alumni left on fairly good terms! These networks are great for posting vacancies, getting references or even staying in touch with employees, a company may want to rehire. Companies have the choice of building custom platforms (but this takes time and effort and, in the end, may not be best-in-class because building networking sites may not be its core competency) or using existing online tools.

A good example of the latter is the Nasscom LinkedIn community, which uses the LinkedIn platform to run a network for users who are first validated to see if they are genuine Nasscom members. The utility is called ‘LinkedIn for Groups’ and is available for free on the LinkedIn site for any group to use.

A recent article mentioned that HCL does a significant proportion of its mid- and senior-level recruitments through LinkedIn. Spurred by the success seen by early adopters, we will see more and more companies in India becoming more innovative and adopting Web 2.0 tools for recruitment, especially given the supply-demand gap.

The next level of Web 2.0 services we’re betting on are built around bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg are popular and useful, and they can be bent to a business context. One of the most interesting experiments in this area has been the IBM Dogear project. IBM describes this service as the first social bookmarking tool designed to support organisations and large corporations. It works just as social bookmarking sites do: users can tag/bookmark useful links using Dogear while putting in a few sentences on what/why they found it useful.

There are two key differences from the social tool. One is that users had to provide their real corporate identities - this was important to tie this up with corporate email, which could extend and complement the use of Dogear. For instance, colleagues at different locations with similar interests or work challenges could, having identified the other through Dogear, now correspond through mail. The second was that Dogear was designed to work behind corporate firewalls - and this meant a whole bunch of internal resources such as knowledge management systems and employee intranets could be bookmarked and shared. This is very relevant for multi-location organisations; employees across the spectrum could access useful bookmarks such as how to requisition common resources, how to fill in assessment forms, or even how to fill leave forms! Such tools have great potential as intuitive training and knowledge management plug-ins and hence we believe that more enterprises will leverage this tool.

With bookmarking, collaboration kicking in, wikis are the next logical step. While it requires an application to house and manage the wiki, once this is set up, organisations will find that wikis are self-sustaining without the overhead of separate teams that intranets normally entail. That's exactly what companies that have launched collaborative wikis have discovered.

In one such product company, the wiki is used for knowledge management, project information sharing, news and updates, where users have rights for specific sections that they periodically update and each group maintains its own area. The wiki has since cannibalised some of the functions of the intranet and the knowledge management systems, since it is always better updated. Since the system is directly updated by users and not collated by another team, updates tend to get in faster. By taking away the need for a separate intranet team, a wiki is a pretty good cost-effective tool for small- to mid-size businesses.

In fact each and every one of the Web 2.0 tools discussed here is either free or low cost - which underlines one of the greatest values of Web 2.0 itself. There are plenty of creative ways to integrate Web 2.0 tools into a business to derive some genuine benefits, and hence our prediction on more widespread adoption in 2008.