The IT industry isn’t known for its creativity when it comes to naming things, so it was inevitable that when people started talking about using these technologies in business, they’d resort to names like Enterprise 2.0 (think enterprise software) or Office 2.0. Although most people outside the industry don't actually know how to pronounce it ('Two Dot Oh?' 'Two Oh?' 'Two?') the point is that it’s all about taking these consumer technologies and using them within your company.

The main characteristic of 2.0 technologies is that they’re easy-to-use and provide a platform for user-generated content – videos on YouTube being a prime example. Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who specialises in the adoption of 2.0 technologies in business, argues that they’re also characterised by the fact that they tend not to impose a structure, which is good for informal collaboration.

Isn’t this about new forms of using software as well – the idea of software being provided as a service, rather than as something you run on your machine?
Up to a point, yes. Web 2.0 software tends to be provided as an online or hosted service – sometimes referred to as Software as a Service. The idea is that a service provider takes all the data and applications you’d normally store on your own PC and runs them for you – you simply access them over the Internet through a standard browser. There are a number of plus points for this approach, particularly the fact that multiple people can access the same document from different locations very easily. Google, for example, provides word processing and spreadsheet applications as a hosted service, and a growing number of multi-location businesses use them to collaborate – including Webster Buchanan Research, as it happens.

So what products are we actually talking about?
There’s a whole host of different services available, including a few key ones that matter to businesses. Blogs are one of them. Although they’re often associated with angst-ridden teenagers delving deep into their souls or enthusiasts swapping knitting patterns and train spotting exploits, blogs actually provide a great, cheap way of communicating both internally and externally. Some CEOs, like Jonathan Schwarz of Sun Microsystems, are famous for sharing their thoughts online, and some blogs are amazingly well read. It’s a great way of communicating with customers - and internally, with employees – without clogging up their email systems, particularly as you can link easily to other documents and websites. But blogs only work if you keep them up to date and post items frequently, so it’s not a commitment to be entered into lightly.

Wikis – which are websites where multiple people can edit documents, like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia – are also getting a lot of airtime as a collaboration tool. Then there are specialist services such as social bookmarking, which let people share knowledge by bookmarking web pages they’ve viewed and tagging them with descriptions. That’s a great potential tool for sharing knowledge in a business. If one of your HR employees is an expert in international employment law and you want to do some research, there’s no better place to start than the web pages they visit.

One other area that’s also grabbing a lot of attention is social networking. If you’ve been invited onto Facebook and wrote it off as something for those younger Generation-Yers, think again. Individuals are increasingly using social networks to keep in touch with business contacts, put feelers out for jobs or hire people, and even bounce ideas around – Harvard’s McAfee, for example, uses his online network to ask research questions.

But how much do people in the real world actually care about this stuff today?
That question has been taxing the brains of the great and the good for some time now. At the inaugural ‘Office 2.0’ conference in San Francisco in 2006, one speaker actually asked exactly that question, pointing out that “if you leave this room, this industry, you don't hear anyone saying 'I really need an Office 2.0, a Web 2.0' or even caring about it.” His point was reinforced somewhat by the fact that there were only 25 real-life businesses attending out of 450 delegates, the rest presumably being a mix of analysts, vendors and, er, bloggers.

But that’s all changing. This year’s Office 2.0 event featured some real-life companies doing real things, particularly in terms of collaboration. They included pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, where a raft of 2.0 initiatives have been driven by internal enthusiasts, and Morgan Stanley, which has 70-80 different web initiatives underway. In many cases, they’re driven from the ground up within organisations rather than the top down, and reflect frustration with traditional ways of working and communicating.

So the big question – how hard is it to put these things to use?
As you’d expect with any new technology adoption, there are quite a few challenges. Organisations are sometimes over ambitious about the amount of comments and interactions they’ll generate around their blogs, for example, and end up disappointed. There are also the inevitable cultural issues you’d expect to encounter when you kick off any new way of working. And there are complex buying decisions to be made – should you buy lots of different 2.0 tools from different vendors and stitch them together, wait for someone to come up with a suite, or build your own? What are the security implications?

But there are challenges when you embrace any new form of working. The real issue is whether you can really make any of these technologies work for you – and the best way to find out is to experiment. Web 2.0 has transformed the way consumers interact in a remarkably short space of time – it’s going to happen in business too, so you may as well get to grips with it as early as possible.