New entrants provide additional options for enterprises willing to consider open-source and software-as-a-service alternatives for horizontal portal functionality. To differentiate their offerings, horizontal portal vendors are incorporating support for enterprise mashups and social networking.

Microsoft and Atlassian announced their SharePoint Connector for Confluence: ThreeWill, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in developing SharePoint-based solutions, which helped design and implement the SharePoint Connector, describes how they did it.

This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges.

Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures—in this case, endangered languages. On a shoestring budget, professors David Harrison and Gregory Anderson navigate difficult terrain, searching for speakers of these forgotten and mostly hidden languages.

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.