Office 2.0 Conference: First Post

The first Office 2.0 just ended this evening in San Francisco.  Hat's off to Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio, IT/Redux blogger and team for initiating and launching this conference in a few short weeks.   Over 450 attendees participated in 2 days of product demonstrations and discussions at the St. Regis next to SFMOMA.     The event was an amalgam of Web-based office productivity tools, enterprise-directed collaboration extensions, social collaboration tools and web-based business process systems.     The panel participants did lots of hand-wringing over when we're all going to wean from e-mail and get with the program, how to manage online/offline sychronization, data security, hybrid is ok-talk.   These questions come into sharper relevance whether you're looking at shifts in enterprise solutions for collaboration, or meeting the needs of small businesses and individuals.

Clearly there's also an emerging generational split on the knowledge worker population that's tied to e-mail and the classic desktop products,  while an emerging generation apparently can-take-it-or-leave-it- thank-you-very-much, just give me You-Tube, my IPod, a wireless handheld that can do IM and audio connection (read phone call) and a browser.

A few areas of clarity around "which market segments are we talking about anyway" would have given the panels a better launch point. Prosumer?  SMB,  Very Small Business (VSB), medium-size enteprise, mega-enterprise (to say nothing of verticals).  And while there were plenty of nods to "it's all about collaboration,"  it was perhaps only Andrew McAffee of Harvard Business School that gave the clearest articulation of where the collaboration opportunity really lies, at least in the enterprise. Some real examples of businesses or teams doing breakthrough innovations or even just getting the work done in a better way with wikis, blogs, RSS, tagging, combo tool sets, would have been important to give some of the talk about the impact of Office 2.0 more grounding.   The next conference would benefit greatly with a few panels on actual human being use cases.

There's lots of energy in this area for very good reason.  While the technology evolution is ripening in the right ways, it's the fundamental set of business needs for accelerated business process productivity and innovation that's driving effective collaboration as a business fundamental.

The first Office 2.0 has been a terrific beginning.  More in the next few days on the products and players at the conference.

The first Office 2.0 just ended this evening in San Francisco.  Hat's off to Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio, IT/Redux blogger and team for initiating and launching this conference in a few short weeks.   Over 450 attendees participated in 2 days of product demonstrations and discussions at the St. Regis next to SFMOMA.     The event was an amalgam of Web-based office productivity tools, enterprise-directed collaboration extensions, social collaboration tools and web-based business process systems.     The panel participants did lots of hand-wringing over when we're all going to wean from e-mail and get with the program, how to manage online/offline sychronization, data security, hybrid is ok-talk.   These questions come into sharper relevance whether you're looking at shifts in enterprise solutions for collaboration, or meeting the needs of small businesses and individuals.

Clearly there's also an emerging generational split on the knowledge worker population that's tied to e-mail and the classic desktop products,  while an emerging generation apparently can-take-it-or-leave-it- thank-you-very-much, just give me You-Tube, my IPod, a wireless handheld that can do IM and audio connection (read phone call) and a browser.

A few areas of clarity around "which market segments are we talking about anyway" would have given the panels a better launch point. Prosumer?  SMB,  Very Small Business (VSB), medium-size enteprise, mega-enterprise (to say nothing of verticals).  And while there were plenty of nods to "it's all about collaboration,"  it was perhaps only Andrew McAffee of Harvard Business School that gave the clearest articulation of where the collaboration opportunity really lies, at least in the enterprise. Some real examples of businesses or teams doing breakthrough innovations or even just getting the work done in a better way with wikis, blogs, RSS, tagging, combo tool sets, would have been important to give some of the talk about the impact of Office 2.0 more grounding.   The next conference would benefit greatly with a few panels on actual human being use cases.

There's lots of energy in this area for very good reason.  While the technology evolution is ripening in the right ways, it's the fundamental set of business needs for accelerated business process productivity and innovation that's driving effective collaboration as a business fundamental.

The first Office 2.0 has been a terrific beginning.  More in the next few days on the products and players at the conference.