Microsoft, other firms take aim at Enterprise 2.0 market with new tools

"It is really from start to finish a full business process that impacts the bottom line," Lavenda said. "These are the types of applications we are seeing."

For its part, Awareness will announce today platform integration with SharePoint for internal applications with Awareness-developed social networks on the Web. Awareness has packaged its widgets to operate as Web Parts that can be used to monitor the content of external Web communities. Thus, users can monitor community content, contribute content -- such as creating a post, starting a wiki or responding to a discussion -- or search content from directly within SharePoint.

"We bring the power of Web 2.0 external facing communities to SharePoint," said Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing and sales at Awareness. "You'd like your SharePoint users to participate in communities without having to log into that community directly. When you look at places like Facebook or LinkedIn, a lot of what make those sites very popular is the connectivity they provide between people -- being able to form a group of people I care about or maintaining a status online of what I'm doing."

Using the Awareness software, community administrators can build structured social areas with security and customization or users can create ad-hoc social areas that other users can join by invitation or request.

Also on Monday, NewsGator Technologies will announce the general availability of Social Sites 2.0, an upgrade of its social computing technology for SharePoint. The new software allows users to create ad hoc communities and supports the easy discovery of these groups through customized recommendations, tag clouds, search and lists of recently created or popular communities, NewsGator said. In addition, the tool provides employees with a social graph -- a list of their connections within the company based on factors like common interests, common community membership and common RSS subscriptions, said Laura Farrelly, NewsGator's director of marketing.

"The system will recommend me to colleagues who are very similar to me," Farrelly noted. "The benefit is to be able to quickly discover people who are like me or work on similar projects. In a large company I may not even know ... someone is working to try to solve the same problem I am."

Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. who focuses on Enterprise 2.0, noted that last year's conference included lots of analysts, vendors and pundits talking to each other. "This year we're going to see a lot more end-user companies, a lot more businesses who are really trying to make use of those tools to join that conversation."