I recently posted on How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign through Central Desktop, an enterprise 2.0 tool. In this post I want to go into more detail on Central Desktop, itself, and what it offers. Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, gave me an overview of the product and a demo, along with his discussion of the Obama campaign use case. Central Desktop provides on demand, web based collaboration tools for business teams. Their focus is the small to midsize business or departments within larger enterprises. The concept is to provide lightweight functionality for most aspects of project team work such as collaboration, communication, project management, content management. As I have written before, using a transparent web 2.0 tool for these functions allows for the creation of a searchable knowledge base as a by product of doing the work. It creates knowledge management on the fly and that is one of the goals of Central Desktop.

Central Desktop is built on a wiki with lots of functionality built on top. Sometimes the wiki base is evident and other times it is under the covers. However, wiki capabilities like version history and reverting to prior versions, as well as editing simplicity and access controls are always available. Issac said that pure wikis can be confusing for the average business users and I would agree. That is why they layered in additional functionality while retaining what works with wikis. This functionality includes the following, along with secure RSS feeds:

Docs & Discussion s- places to store files, documents and web pages
Tasks - they are assignable, dynamic to-do lists from workgroups with several related features
Milestones - team goals that can be assigned to team members and aggregated
Calendar - can be used to manage tasks, milestones, & events (this feature and the ones above were used by some Obama staffers and precinct captains)
Databases - create and manage custom lists (another capability used by the Obama campaign) - these lists can be public or private
Reports - a variety of reports can be generated
Media - storage for media assets that do not require check in and out
Blog - for internal use (in Texas this was used for people to record stories about how they became Obama supporters)
Forum - for internal use
Internal Members Directory

I think you can see how a political campaign can make good use of many of these tools but they also apply to most enterprise settings. The Central Desktop people also created several workspace types that made use of the above capabilities. These included: project management, a content strategy template, database for managing contacts and other lists, internal corporate blog, forum, and a simple plain wiki format for those who want to start in this manner. There is layered security that is very important for business wikis. With a little configuration, Central Desktop has taken steps to make it easier to provide a single-sign-on experience to other applications or intranets (such as third party bug tracking software or corporate intranets). You can also adjust the look and feel of the interface. Setting up a Central Desktop workspace involves using a mix of the above capabilities. It is a little like choosing portlets for a portal. Full-text search is active across all documents within the system.

There is also email enablement so you can communicate with central desktop via email and have the content posted within the web-based tool, a useful feature I am seeing on an increasing number of enterprise 2.0 applications. Issac said that this ability to use email increases adoption rates. If you are a trusted email address you see content on group distributions but if you are not you have to pass through the central desktop sign in to get to it as another security measure. This feature came out of one client’s need to maintain its HIPPA compliance. There is a Central Desktop blog for the back story.

Rob Paterson commented on my Fast Forward post on the Obama campaign’s use of Central Desktop, “…isn’t the organization of his campaign a model for effectiveness and does it not show a brilliant insight into his understanding of the new reality? Imagine a fortune 500 CEO with this approach and what they could do.” Indeed,