Enterprise collaboration software vendor MindTouch continues its march to take over corporate intranets with this week's release of MindTouch 2009. In addition to assorted improvements and upgrades, the new version also adds three useful features that offer an extra layer of functionality to MindTouch-powered sites.

The inclusion of collaborative video capabilities lets project team members publish video right to MindTouch sites where multiple users can collaborate on and edit them. The new content staging and application packaging features make it easy to collaborate on mashups and application development, then compress the files for distribution to other MindTouch deployments.

We've reported before on how the gloomy economic environment is increasing enterprise adoption of open source software, and we're not the only ones. As we reported here, when respondents to North Bridge Partners' Future of Open Source Survey were asked if the economic downturn is having a good or bad effect on open source, a whopping 96 percent of survey respondents answered "good." That was up from 81 percent in last year's survey. Notably, though, many of those same survey respondents felt that lack of awareness of open source alternatives to proprietary software is a significant obstruction to open source adoption in enterprises.

I've thought of all of these things as I've been sifting through Datamation's exhaustive "101 Open Source Apps for Enterprises" collection. It contains lots of surprises, and applications that many companies should look into.

While we've all been speculating about whether Dell is working on Android netbooks, the computer hardware and software vendor was busy bundling open source applications to offer to small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customers looking for low cost alternatives to commercial software. The pre-configured "SMB-in-a-box" software is only available in the U.S. for now, but Dell expects to lauch a similar offering in Asia by the end of 2009.