Yesterday, I popped along to the Atlassian User Group and Open House to catch up with some old and new (riotous) acquaintances.  The meet-up coincided nicely with the release of Confluence 2.10, which includes a multimedia widget connector (for embedding twitter, flickr, google docs, friendfeed, etc, in web pages) and improved search/discovery (e.g. 'did you mean' prompts, quick navigation and OpenSearch). 
 
The presentations were suitably diverse, ranging from agile development and tailoring developer/collaboration tools to facilitate Scrum, to the implementation of a social networking wiki for GovUnited.nl.  I was particularly curious about the latter given Headshift's recent work with Barnet Council, which resulted in the fastest (not to mention highly functional and beautifully skinned) Confluence implementation in the west! 

What's interesting about the GovUnited.nl story is the effort to improve government services within the various districts through cross-municipal collaboration. That means supporting the growth of communities amongst municipals with the use of social tools, which have been tailored to meet the specific (and changing) needs of various user groups.

This example illustrates, once again, that there is no one size fits all product which can simply be rolled out to solve the array of information and knowledge management issues experienced by different groups and organisations.  Instead the solution needs to be appropriately designed to fit user and business needs, as well as the context of the organisation.  That is a critical step towards smoothing the adoption process, and one that we find is too often overlooked in the rush to implement a technical solution.  As the old adage goes: more haste = less speed (in adoption).