Finally, we decided to evaluate the following ap-
plications (in alphabetical order): Alfresco Share
2
,
Atlassian Confluence
3
, GroupSwim
4
, Liferay Social
Office
5
, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server
6
, Social-
text
7
, Tricia.
Due to space limitations, it is not possible to in-
clude all detailed results of our analysis in this pa-
per. We will focus in the following on presenting
our methodology as well as the catalog of services
we created. The complete results can be found on-
line at (B
¨
uchner et al., 2009). The online resource is
intended to be expanded by additional tools in the fu-
ture.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives
an overview of related work. We then elaborate in
section 3 on how we analyzed the content types sup-
ported by each tool. In section 4 we introduce a cata-
log of services, which we used to evaluate Enterprise
2.0 tools. In section 6, we present the methodology of
how we evaluated the given tools against the catalog.
The paper concludes with a summary and an outlook.
2 RELATED WORK
As shown in (Koch, 2008), Enterprise 2.0 tools are in
the long-standing tradition of groupware and CSCW
applications. In (Rama and Bishop, 2006), a compar-
ison of six commercial and academic CSCW systems
is presented.
As already mentioned, (Drakos, 2007) classifies
25 tools using alongside the non-functional dimen-
sions ability to execute and completeness of vision.
As a result, each tool falls into one of the quadrants
challengers, leaders, niche players, and visionaries.
Two tools are classified as niche players, two applica-
tions come out as visionaries, and the great majority
of tools has been classified as challengers.
There are some publicly available tool compar-
isons, which focus on tools for specific functionali-
ties: WikiMatrix
8
, ForumMatrix
9
, Blog Comparison
Chart
10
. The focus of these comparisons is on one
particular content type (wiki, forum, and blog).
Furthermore, there is work towards identifying
2
http://www.alfresco.com/products/collaboration
3
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
4
http://groupswim.com/products/collaboration-software
5
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/products/social office
6
http://www.microsoft.com/Sharepoint/default.mspx
7
http://www.socialtext.com
8
http://www.wikimatrix.org
9
http://www.forummatrix.org
10
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog software compari-
son.cfm
services, Enterprise 2.0 tools should provide. In
(McAfee, 2006) the following services according the
SLATES acronym are identified:
1. Search is required to find content objects,
2. Links connect and relate content objects,
3. Authoring makes it easy to contribute new con-
tent,
4. Tags form a bottom-up categorization system,
5. Extensions can be used to automatically compute
recommendations,
6. Signals create awareness for the activities of other
user.
In (Hinchcliffe, 2007), an extension of SLATES
is proposed, which in addition puts emphasis on the
social, emergent, freeform, and network-oriented as-
pects. Nevertheless, as already mentioned in sec-
tion 1, these service descriptions are quite fuzzy and
cannot be used to compare concrete Enterprise 2.0
tools in an objective manner.
3 CONTENT TYPES
From a technical point of view an Enterprise 2.0 tool
provides collaboration and communication services
by many of content objects, e.g. wiki pages, blog
posts, comments, files. Each application comes with
a set of predefined content types, which realize the
concepts provided by the tool. To get an overview
of the capabilities of a given tool, it is helpful to first
understand the supported content types and their as-
sociations.
As a first step in our survey, we therefore identi-
fied the core content types of each investigated tool
and modeled them using a UML class diagram per
application.
As it turned out, it is useful to differentiate be-
tween core content types, and orthogonal content
types, which are needed to implement the services de-
scribed in section 4. Examples of orthogonal content
types are rating, tag, version. To keep the models
clean and simple, orthogonal content types are not
modeled in our class diagrams, but rather discussed
in section 4. In the following, we will use the shorter
term content type to mean core content type.
Due to space limitations, we cannot present the
models of all surveyed applications here. As an ex-
ample, the model of the content types provided by
GroupSwim is shown in figure 1. The models of all
analyzed tools can be found online at (B
¨
uchner et al.,
2009).
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