Wednesday 6 August 2008

omCollab - Intergrated enterprise 2.0 toolset

Stumbled across this one today while reviewing options for improving our Scuttle, social bookmarking, instance. I've been keeping a watching brief on the work that Andreas has been doing ever since I met him at a London Wiki Wednesday meeting about a year ago. I remember a conversation about how social bookmarking was undervalued and the great opportunity for integration between social bookmarking and the other web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 tools. Well Andreas has not only developed an updated and improved version of Scuttle, omBookmarks, but has actually released an integrated suite of open source web2.0/enterprise2.0 tools, omCollab. What is more this has all been nicely packaged and released as open source (installation and download instructions here).
omCollab combines MediaWiki, Wordpress and omBookmarks together, while judicious and intelligent use of mediawiki extensions provides light but significant integration between the tools. The user is presented with a consistent look and feel across the platform with integration of the user ID delivering a solid social networking experience.
Andreas has delivered a great product that is significantly ahead of the crowd. IMHO it has the potential to be an open source challenger to Microsfot's SharePoint, IBM's Connections and probable knocks Suite 2.0 into touch. Does it contain all the tools I've previously identified as constituting the enterprise2.0 tool set? No a GTDware component is missing and without RSS it may well prove difficult to deliver a rich social profile into the social networking experience however these thing can be added with time. For now just enjoy and be grateful someone has raised the bar on enterprise2.0.