A new report entitled Online Communities in Business contains some great information on how the use of collaboration technologies in business is predicted to evolve over the next 1-to-5 years. Many-2-Many points out that one of the biggest challenges, however, is (still!) measuring ROI; would love comments from anyone who has a novel and/or effective way to do this.
According to the report (pdf here)
“In terms of growth, in the one-year timeframe, teamrooms, weblogs, and social networking show the biggest expected gains”
for customer-oriented and customer-facing collaboration, which covers Customer Care, Marketing and Sales, as well as New Media/Publishing.
UPDATE on the Microsoft CRM debacle: Lead story on CRM Buyer today indicates that Microsoft is starting to contact their CRM customers directly to try and manage the situation.