The best social sites and search engines alone won't tell you how valuable your business is, but a series of calculations against a few key answers you provide, compared to other businesses, will. That's why a decision support system (DSS) is needed.

Wouldn't it be great to go to Google and query "How much is my business worth?" and then have an input form with a few questions and then an answer on the spot? Today the top search result is for 'information' that goes into valuing a company and a link to purchasing a book for further guidance.

A DSS could also help you in times of a crisis to narrow down your exact situation and provide you with an answer specific to you. I often find that I need to read four or five web pages to pinpoint an answer. It would be great to have a workflow that arrives at this sooner and more accurately.

Existing crowd-sourced decision engines also take time to get an answer because they require knowledgable people who are willing to answer. The questions are often repeated on different sites with a different audience.

So, how does the world accumulate and share this information? That's the complicated part. Ideally there would be questionnaires, quizzes, polls and such that are aggregated – perhaps as part of the search results themselves. DSS widgets can blanket the web on sites similar to how advertisements do today.

At Concursive, we've made a DSS that can be authored by a developer and placed on any of our ConcourseConnect sites within a portlet. We're not sure how the rest of the world will use it, but today we're creating polls, assessments and training materials for our customers. I would love to see something universal.

The Open Source files for ConcourseConnect (OSI approved AGPL license) are being hosted by Google Code and Sourceforge.net. The reason we went with Google Code is initially for reliability and then later because the Open Source code base is synchronized directly to Google Code and you can review the changelog in near real-time. The reason we went with Sourceforge is because Sourceforge has a large inventory of Open Source software and for that reason it makes sense. Here's how I feel about the choices today...

My favorite IDE reached version 10 in December and I finally got around to downloading a demo of the commercial version. I'm still using a previous commercial version for nearly all of my development projects but I have been using IDEA 10 Community Edition for some of my javascript projects so at least I'll be familiar with some of the UI improvements. What I'm looking forward to in the latest commercial edition:

• Having a current IDE for technologies and frameworks that I work with
• Improvements with source code repositories
• "100% faster code indexing, and an overall performance increase"
• "New code completion behavior with automatic invocation while typing"

UPDATE: Read on for info on my upgrade experience...

This is a question that we have internally discussed for years.  We decided that the answer was yes, a corporate web site can be a social networking community, and we have been running a web site and community, all-in-one, for about 8 years now.  Powering concursive.com is ConcourseConnect 2.0 -- it's a collaboration application, but with the flexibility of a light-weight content management system.

JetBrains recently released a preview version of IntelliJ as Open Source.  The marketing page declares IntelliJ as "The Most Intelligent Java IDE — Now Free and Open Source."

I've been a paying customer of IntelliJ IDEA for several years, and with this news I thought, how great! I can continue to use the Enterprise edition on my main computer, and on my second computer use the Community edition for minor edits.  You can't run two copies of IntelliJ Enterprise at the same time on the same network, so I have avoided using IntelliJ on two computers and use NetBeans instead.

The Community Edition looks very familiar to those using the Enterprise edition, with a few graphical color changes and some features removed.  Most of the removed features are for hardcore refactoring, testing, and developing with integrated web servers... features a useful editor wouldn't need anyhow.  The most surprising removed feature however, is that the "Most Intelligent Java IDE" doesn't know what a Java Server Pages (.jsp) file is.  That's right, try to open a .jsp and the editor asks the user what to do with it.  Is it a text file? an html file? well, no it's a .jsp!  At a time when Eclipse, NetBeans, and even editors like JEdit have no problems identifying .jsp files, why would that feature be removed?  I hope this feature gets added before the final Community Edition release.  For a java web developer, or even to augment a primary IDE, the Community Edition just doesn't cut it.  

With that said, I think the move by IntelliJ to Open Source part of the IDE is a great gesture.  I'm all too familiar with open-sourcing an application and maintaining dual-licensed editions so the devotion to the Community Edition will certainly be scrutinized by users.  The IDE is really top-notch and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.  Will it make sense to use the Community Edition?  What do you think about it?