Phil Windley has written an article entitled "Groupware Toolkits and the Benefits of Being Open"
Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog
Phil, I like your "blog this" feature also...
This whole idea of Groupware Toolkits really sank in as I was reading Jon Udell's "Practical Internet Groupware". Yeah, it's been out of print for a while, but I only recently acquired a copy for myself. Although it's a little dated in the technology area, in the social aspects of groupware I thought it was still right on. And one of the things that I began to fully understand was that endusers really don't care about what's under the hood, so to speak. Low level technology just isn't interesting (even after you bury it in a useful application).
As a concrete example, I really don't know anyone around me who gets as excited as I do over RSS and syndication. But, once I built a specific example of how they could receive email updates of recent business developments, I got some interested folks. One interesting observation that I've had - once you associate two concepts together (such as RSS and newsfeeds) then people will become blinded to some of the other possible applications of syndication. I'm sure I do it, too, it's just that I *notice* when other people do it.
[For the "motorheads" out there, I just put together some tools (a Nucleus weblog, rss2email, a majordomo mailing list, grabnews, and cron job) to allow users a choice of ways in which to receive their news - RSS feed, email, or HTML.]