Enterprise bookmarking is a method for corporate users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data objects stored in distributed storage. This is done collectively and/or collaboratively in a process by which users add tag metadata in the form of non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. These tags are applied to web pages and are known as tag clouds. In addition, tag metadata can be expanded to provide a wealth of information about the data including description tags, hierarchical category tags, global name tags, location tags, link tags, annotation tags, derivative tags, comment tags, and ontology tags. These tags are applied to structured and semi-structured data and are known as tag profiles.

There are three basic types of Enterprise bookmarking tools that leverage either tag clouds, tag profiles, or both.

The first is very similar to social bookmarking and allows web users in the organization to create, share, organize, and search the bookmarks of different web pages. This type of tool leverages non-heirarchical keyword tag clouds. These tags can be shared publicly for any other enterprise user or privately for specific use in private corporate groups, or a combination of the two. The sole focus of these tools are sorting and tagging web pages. Cogenz (www.cogenz.com/) and Scuttle (http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/) are both good examples of this type of very simple bookmarking.

The second type is a combination of both social bookmarking and social networking that offers a user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, and bookmarks relative to a specific subject area. This type of tool also leverages non-heirarchical keyword tag clouds. Like social bookmarking users create, share, and organize bookmarks of web pages but this software allows them to do discover web pages published by specific users or networks of users. It provides a framework and history of what other users have found on the web that was of interest. Jive (http://www.jivesoftware.com) and Connectbeam (http://www.connectbeam.com) and are two good examples of this type of bookmarking.

A new and emerging type of bookmarking created by Jumper Networks (http://www.jumpernetworks.com) expands on the basic premise of tagging to capture a broader set of information about the data in your organization. It takes the concept beyond just web pages to include any data; including relational tables, flat files, images, video, drawings, and documents. This type of tool leverages both tag clouds and more sophisticated tag profiles. The expanded tag fields allow users to input more than keyword knowledge, they can categorize the data, provide definitions, descriptions, add comments and notes to the data, capture the system metadata, and much more. Another key feature is that these tag profiles can grow organically and collect knowledge from many different users. One user might tag the data with keywords only, another user will add a description, a third user could annotate the data, a fourth might add some schema metadata. It is this ability for the tag profiles to grow overtime and for the expanded capability of the tool that I think is a big advantage.

While there are a few different platforms each for specific uses Enterprise Bookmarking is likely the easiest route into the Enterprise 2.0 world for most users. It is intuitive to use, search has an implicit value and instant return on investment for most organizations.