Stories by: Mike Heck

There's little argument that Telligent's Community Server can stand up to the rigors of hosting public-facing communities. This product is the force behind some of the biggest and most visible blogs on the Net, including MySpace, the National Football League, and National Geographic. An equal number of clients -- the likes of Dell, GlaxoSmithKline, and Ernst & Young -- use this platform for business-to-business and business-to-consumer communities.

We have watched Xythos mature impressively over the years, starting as a highly usable, economical document manager through Version 6.0, then broadening its appeal with records management. Enterprise Document Management Suite (DMS) has now reached Version 7.0, and with the number bump comes some important enhancements.

If the many business-oriented blog and wiki solutions are starting to look like one big blur, you're not alone. Most "Web 2.0 collaboration" vendors give you a departmental wiki that works about the same as the rest, but doesn't handle large enterprise deployments or connect with information in other parts of your organization. About a year ago, Jive Software successfully brought a lot of attention to the enterprise social networking category with Clearspace and Clearspace X, collaboration and community platforms, respectively, that provided unusual scalability and usability -- plus they integrated blogs and wikis across the business.

Small and midsize businesses face many obstacles when trying to compete with larger enterprises. One classic handicap of the smaller business is the second-class phone system, the shortcomings of which are both glaringly apparent to callers outside the organization and keenly felt by the employees inside, who know that sounding professional when clients and prospects call is a crucial part of building relationships and sales.

Sutus started shipping Business Central in November 2007 and is already making waves with this unified communication solution. Although it primarily competes on price and easy administration, there are other advantages for small-office owners.

Microsoft's Response Point is PBX software that runs on Embedded XP inside of hardware sold by three Microsoft partners -- Aastra, D-Link, and Quanta -- with more partners to come later in 2008, according to Microsoft. You can engage a VAR to install the system or do it yourself without much effort.

Fonality takes a different approach with PBXtra, which, like cousin Trixbox and Critical Links' EdgeBox, incorporates the open source Asterisk. PBXtra is not only the most affordable system in this roundup, but is unique in being a managed product. Customers get a low-end Celeron tower PC that's set up without incurring any installation costs, and a Web interface that lets users customize the system (such as recording voice prompts) without IT help. Fonality remotely monitors the system, provisions the phones, and backs up data off-site.

Allworx's trio of product lines include two VoIP telephone handsets, three combination telephony and network servers, plus five software packages that are separately licensed for unlimited use. The PBX contains many standard features, including unified messaging and site-to-site access; the five separate applications add specific advanced functions, such as call queuing or conferencing, allowing you to purchase only the capabilities you need. Each server eases administration with automated backup.

Critical Links' EdgeBox line includes three Asterisk-based appliances: Office (40 users), Business (100 users), and Enterprise (300 users). The 2U rack-mount servers vary in disk space (80GB to 250GB), connectivity (such as integrated Wi-Fi), and redundancy options.

Fundamentally, Lotus Notes and Domino 8 aren't about new mail and calendar features. Rather, this release is about a change in the desktop client. The inbox is now home base for integrating all types of business applications. A lot has already been said about the programming model, Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1, which employs eclipse.org open standards. So let's spotlight the user experience and collaboration.

I'll admit that in my IBM Lotus Notes 7 review about two years ago, I got Version 8's release date a wee bit off. Hey, the fortune teller I consulted skipped town right after the reading. But my wrap-up hit the mark, saying Notes 8 "should further support composite applications, such as bringing together e-mail, documents, and meetings into a single interface -- a key part of an SOA." Here's my initial impression of how well IBM Lotus engineers met this goal and the way they did it.