The buzz around Web 2.0 up to now has mainly been about things like blogs, "social networking" and swapping photos, but businesses are slowly climbing onto the bandwagon and new Web-based applications aimed directly at corporate users are making an appearance. Some are calling it "Enterprise 2.0."
One of the benefits of Web-based software and services -- often referred to collectively as Web 2.0 -- is that they make it easy for users to collaborate and share documents and data with others, which can help speed up the rate at which ideas come together. For example, the on-line word-processing service called Writely (now owned by Google), allows users to upload and edit Word documents and other files, and to share them with others -- as do similar services such as ThinkFree Office, Jotspot and Zoho Writer.
While most of these Web-based services are aimed at individual users, they are increasingly finding their way into corporate environments as well, where people use them to stay in touch with co-workers or pull together projects.
Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee calls it "Enterprise 2.0" -- a set of interactive, Web-based applications that companies can use to help employees work together and get the jump on rivals, without the cost of buying and hosting expensive software.
"There is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration," former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown told a recent technology conference. Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Lotus division, said the Web 2.0 method of "capturing collaborative wisdom . . . is a different take on knowledge management, which was fundamentally flawed."
One of the latest entrants in this field is Vancouver-based Dabble DB, which came out of private "beta" mode this week and launched the public version of its service: An interactive database management tool that will spread joy to corporate project managers everywhere.
"This is Web 2.0 for the enterprise," the company's two 20-something co-founders, Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant, said in a recent phone interview. "It is absolutely for businesses, not for the average consumer user. What we've done is take all the principles of Web 2.0 and apply them to the enterprise."
The company announced a round of financing (rumoured to be in the $2-million U.S. range) this week from Vancouver-based venture capital group Ventures West. Paul Kedrosky, the Canadian-born adviser to Ventures West who helped strike the deal and will take a seat on the Dabble board, says the company is focused squarely on helping business users make better use of the Web.
Users can upload Excel spreadsheets, databases, contact lists and other data with a single click, and then create an interactive database on the fly, editing categories or sorting data in different ways. Users can then share the data by exporting it as HTML, PDF document or RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, used by blogs to syndicate their content.
The co-founders say they wanted to take all the data that companies currently manage with Microsoft Excel -- even though it isn't meant to be a database management tool -- and make it easier for people to interact with.
Although Google recently launched a service that allows users to share their spreadsheets with others over the Web, Dabble says the two products don't really compete. "If anything, Google Spreadsheets is complementary," Mr. Catton said. "It's still just a spreadsheet, and we're trying to do much more than that."
One issue some companies have with Web-based applications is that their proprietary data might be available for anyone to see.
Salesforce -- which has 400,000 mainly corporate users -- "has been very successful in getting people comfortable with putting their data on-line," Mr. Catton said. "The problem is there but it's becoming less of one . . . only about 2 or 3 per cent of the businesses we talk to raise that" as an issue.
The company has prototyped a server-based solution that could be operated by corporate IT departments from behind the firewall, but says it is focusing on a Web-based solution because it is cheaper and easier to implement.
The co-founders said they priced their service at a relatively low level ($10 a month for the lowest tier, with additional features costing more) so that Dabble could get a foot in the door at companies and get users "evangelizing." It's hoped that more companies, once they see the productivity improvements that Web 2.0 applications can bring, will be more open to the idea of "Enterprise 2.0."
Mathew Ingram writes analysis and commentary for globeandmail.com
