Enterprise Mashups for Collaborative E-Learning Environments

Due to global competition, rapid product life cycles and reduced time-to-market enterprises sense the increasing necessity for flexible knowledge-transfer mechanisms transferring new content concerning their products, services or in-house information systems to their employees. This article discusses enterprise mashups as a comfortable approach for easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative e-learning environments that allow the integration into the existing enterprise information architecture and have a common, companywide well known look-and-feel. Basic requirements for knowledge transfer in enterprises are listed, and subsequently we analyse and discuss to which extent enterprise mashups have the potential to fulfil them. Based on the resulting findings a use case covering a server-side enterprise mashup using Microsoft Office SharePoint is presented.