To BEA or not to BEA? ;)

For those of you who haven't yet discovered the new suite of KM-Collaboration-Enterprise 2.0 products from
BEA, here is some dough and some links. I spent some time and went through the overview of the three products positioned in this category and found them to be interesting if not exhaustive. These three products belong to BEA's AcquaLogic basket and are called Pages, Ensemble and Pathways respectively.

Pages is perhaps the equivalent of MS Sharepoint TeamSites...but to be fair to BEA, Pages seems to be better in terms of its user-friendliness and some other additional options. pages has ready-to-use blog and wiki features. Ensemble is somewhat like a portal for the developer community and goes beyond the basics in allowing for quick mashups as well.

Pathways is a typical combination of web 2.0 features like tags, tag clouds, bookmarking and search. BEA claims that the Search is excellent but - of course - only user experience can help validate that. Additionally, BEA talks about a particular style of calculating the Search Rank as a new concept/approach that they've introduced. BEA allows free trials....so it must be possible to experience these products and compare them with other products.

Will they beat the others - MS/IBM/EMC - to it? Will Google come out with a nice suite of products (positioned under the KM umbrella) that replicates the corresponding Internet versions? Will there ever be an almost perfect KM-Collaboration product in the KM landscape? What about components for Social Networking, Idea Generation, Brainstorming etc? I don't have any answers as of now....but here are the links...

Pages Ensemble Pathways

Update: Here's a good article that compares BEA's offerings with IBM Lotus and a couple of other similar products from startups.