After months of hard work it’s finally here: omCollab, the Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform that powers MIKE2.0 and our BearingPoint internal collaboration site. We have packaged up Mediawiki, Wordpress and omBookmarks (a fork of Scuttle) into a single collaboration platform that can be used to host powerful online communities on the web or inside organisations. It’s a comprehensive collaboration platform which combines the following features in one single, integrated platform:

• Wiki
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Mashups
• Search

Please see omCollab Homepage for full details.

We have released omCollab to the open source community because we want to build the world’s most powerful open source Enterprise 2.0 platform. We will continue to invest time and effort to improve omCollab as it powers MIKE2.0, the open source methodology for Enterprise Information Management. We hope that we can get the open source community engaged to help contribute to omCollab.

If you want to know where we are going, what features we are planning to build and maybe offer your help to achieve this, please check out the omCollab roadmap.

Finally, if you just want to check out omCollab for yourself or maybe even power your online community with it, go to the omCollab download and installation page

“It’s an unrealistic expectation for information to be right all the time”. Wow, that’s a statement, especially if coming from a high-level executive from a major information management company, namely Chris Livesey, IBM Information Management Director of UK, Ireland and South Africa, as heard at the Information on Demand conference last week in London. Is it really possible that the largest vendor of IM software and solutions is admitting that it can’t get information right? … yes and it’s probably a smart move. Information management is complex and its complexity increases with the size of the corporation. Large enterprises have a myriad of systems creating, storing, sharing and destroying information and all what Chris is saying is that it is unrealistic to think you can fix the issues in such a complex systems with a couple of IM projects or programme. And clients will thank and respenct him for this honesty…

Chris also went on to discuss what is on IBM’s IM agenda. It’s split in an “application agenda” and an “information agenda”, with the former including the good old SCM, CRM and ERP solutions and the latter the more recent and more innovative areas of customers profitability, dynamic supply chain, multi-channel marketing etc.

The expected revenue and growth for the respective areas highlight how IBM is carving up the market between these two agendas. And as usual, these would be important hints for the management and technology consultants, systems integrators and the likes on where to put their money.

IBM is delivering these solutions with “open standards and flexible architectures to enable Information on Demand” and presents (as expected) a formidable stack of software products to deliver this vision.

What suprised me was that there was no talk of collaboration, user interaction, knowledge sharing or even a word about Enterprise2.0?! IBM has an equally impressive product set for collaboration (Lotus Instant Messaging, Lotus Team Workplace, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr etc.). This should be included in their IM vision, not only for sales and monetary reason, but also for completeness of what IM can deliver to clients. Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration and Communities of Interest are on MIKE2.0’s agenda.

What’s on your IM agenda?