Skillfully social.

By Hope Neal, Contributing Editor

Companies embrace wikis, blogs, collaboration tools found on the lofty Web 2.0 landscape

In January, PTC , a supplier of product life-cycle management (PLM) software, released Windchill ProductPoint, describing it as a social product development tool. While Windchill ProductPoint brings more collaboration to the product development process, the social product development descriptor refers to the collaborative functionality the software offers, such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, and social networking.

The idea of leveraging these types of collaborative capabilities--sometimes referred to as social computing or Web 2.0--specifically for product development is part of a larger movement in which the tools people use to socialize or create connections are being adopted by companies to enable collaboration.

Microsoft , for one, started a strong push to incorporate social computing within the enterprise infrastructure upon release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which offers many of these capabilities out of the box.

"We see this as [an evolving] work style," says Simon Floyd, worldwide industry director of PLM strategy for Microsoft.

In part, the growing use of social computing technologies is driven by the need to capture and find information.