Functional analysis of enterprise 2.0 tools: A services catalog

Abstract

In recent years a new class of integrated web-based enterprise tools emerged facilitating team collaboration and knowledge management. In this paper we provide a detailed analysis of their concepts and services. We examined the following commercial and open source Enterprise 2.0 tools in detail: Alfresco Share, Atlassian Confluence, GroupSwim, Jive SBS, Liferay Social Office, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Socialtext, Tricia. Thereby, we derived an unifying multi-dimensional classification and evaluation framework. For each dimension we identified several technical criteria to characterize the functional capabilities of a given tool. Based on this schema we conduct a detailed evaluation for each particular tool. This work contributes to a better technical understanding of this emerging family of enterprise applications, highlights strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and identifies areas for further system research and development. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.