Corporate buyers are generally a conservative lot. Which makes the explanation of new concepts such as enterprise 2.0 a difficult but not impossible task. Over the past few months I’ve been having fruitful discussion with senior buyers using terms such as enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, collaboration, voip, unified comms, instant messaging, video, forums without really scaring anyone. When it comes to wiki’s however I do notice a change in body language and tone, people seem to have a natural reflex against it. Is it because wiki sounds like geek language and is a bit too abstract a term?

The functionality wiki’s can provide are a core element of enterprise 2.0 yet it is very difficult to express in a word. The brains at Microsoft have understood the corporate world perfectly and have labeled their wiki product sharepoint. I have heard/seen senior executives prefer to use the term Sharepoint when refering to the generic technology rather than the more accurate term of wiki. Microsoft are really pushing Sharepoint at the moment along with OCS, I wonder if anyone else has come across the bic/hoover/sellotape/sharepoint headache?  If anyone has any suggestions please shout out, I don’t think it’s a trivial point.