I wrote about Tomoye a while back (see Tomoye: Bringing Web 2.0 to Communities of Practice). Ecco is their flagship product. Last week I spoke again with Eric Sauve, their CEO and Co-Founder. We first discussed the June 2008 Aberdeen Group study. Eric said that Aberdeen found that 38% of “best-in-class” companies are using social software for “connecting workers with subject matters experts” while only 20% of the rest are doing this. Here is one more clear statistic on the virtues of enterprise 2.0. This task is one thing that Tomoye enables through its communities of practice platform.

We also discussed their Sharepoint integration. Tomoye was one of nine software companies that announced integration with Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Each of these players represent a different aspect of enterprise 2.0. This was good move on Tomoye’s part, as well as on Microsoft’s part. As the Microsoft announcement said, “Tomoye is delivering a SharePoint Server-ready offering to enable organizations to deploy communities of practice using proven process and technology.” Tomoye is built on ,NET, the same language as Sharepoint to make for a tight integration. Here is a screen shot of a SharePoint page showing the ability to upload a file directly to Tomoye Ecco from within a SharePoint drop down menu.

You can search within Tomoye communities using Sharepoint, access both through single sign-on and syndicate content from Tomoye Ecco to Sharepoint through RSS. You can also aggregate content from Sharepoint sites into Tomoye communities, bookmark to Tomoye communities through Sharepoint sites, and reveal Sharepoint sites in the community’s taxonomy.
Tomoye provides both a SaaS and an on-premise offering. Eric said that the SaaS model is the most popular. They now have around 500,000 seats under maintenance. With companies such as Bose, the US Army, National Research Council Canada, Lockheed Martin, the US General Services Administration, UNESCO, and the US Internal Revenue Service. Tomoye has a variety of pricing models and has initiated a 50 seats free forever policy to encourage exploration. Here is a screen shot of a Tomoye community page.