Office 2.0 conference summary

Well, back at home in the good ol' UK courtesy of United Airlines, not a bad flight, but as I said to Oliver from Sony, thank the lords for the PSP and some anime ......

So, the highlights; well some good sessions with thought provoking discussion, and ability to see some of the wares being demo'd on the lovely big screen Apple iMac's. So, here are the main points that I have personally taken away from the conference, and how they may fit into OU projects:

1. The hosted SaaS model, and why it does not fit for some enterprises. To every vendor who described to me how secure their data centre is, what is that you are not understanding about enterprise security ? Yes, I know, my data might be encrypted within your system, your sys admins don't have access, etc etc, but some enterprises are 'conservative' when it comes to their data you know. This is especially so, when the business in question is one that works with, and creates information / knowledge. When your data is your organisational crown jewels then your CEO / CIO / IT Director are not going to be won over by arguements of how great the SaaS model is and how much its going to save them on their storage bill. They may well be won over by 'cool' web 2.0 style apps if they offer good API's for integration with other enterprise apps, if they speak LDAP with the corporate directory service and maybe present their GUI via the corporate portal.

2. However, all is not gloom and doom, I am not anti-web 2.0 ! I do think where the web 2.0 guys should be marketing their wares is to the small to medium size enterprise (SME -> SMB in the UK) sector, or enterprises that are focused on manufacturing or logistics or something similar. In other words, to the small business the value proposition is in not having to have your own IT team / data centre, and its similar for those big businesses who are ok having their customer lists and accounts etc hosted in someone else's servers. Or indeed, to Universities with lost of students..... ?

3. Social Networking. Apparently, I am one of only 3 odd people in the world who does not want to mix their digital working life, with their digital home life ;-} I am quite happy having separate digital persona's, but then I am tech savvy enough to aggregate them using tools like Pageflakes or Netvibes, which apparently (and probably correctly) the average punter is not. There was a lot of discussion at the conference on how businesses would probably prefer LinkedIn to go down the Facebook route (opening up the platform) but I am not sure I agree, there are plenty of options for a business that wants to include social networking in their 'enterprise 2.0 mix'

So, what can I take away from the conference that is specifically of use to the OU ?

Well, I saw a couple of good alternatives to the 'portal platform' software for the redevelopment of the OU Intranet, in ThoughtFarmer and Jives' Clearspace (which was used for the 02con web site), however Oliver from Sony also confirmed in my mind the suitability of an enterprise class portal.

Cogenz looks very interesting for enterprise social bookmarking, but to be honest, I am not sure the that the OU requires 'secure' social bookmarking, del.icio.us might just be good enough for us, but then Cogenz released an API at the conference which allows for integration.

On the social networking front both Ning and the newly released Sosius could give a private Facebook group a good run for its money for a 'closed' or 'OU employee only' social networking site. However Sosius is a broad product cutting across social networking, online storage/file sharing and online applications spaces. (I think the guys should wrap it all up, do a deal with Dell to provide it on a 2U rack mount server and provide it as a turnkey 'intranet in a box').

Not being an academic, a learning design professional or pedagogy expert, I can not say I took an awful lot away from the 'Classroom 2.0' session, with its focus on the U.S. school (K12 ?) environment, and I think there are better minds than mine considering where web 2.0 / classroom 2.0 fits into the online and distance learning environments.

The OU does not need an online office suite, and we have project management and collaboration products, so I apologise to all the conference exhibitors I have not name checked, but there you go.

I would like to end with a mention to Freshbooks, principally their CEO Mike, and marketing head honcho Sunir, who being nice Canadians took pity on me as a 'wannabe' Canadian and let me tag a long to meet with some of their friends on Wednesday evening - thanks guys, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation :-)

Finally, what do you call if you have a 'fire 2.0' ?

Enterprise collaboration session

Chaired by Dan Farber, with the august panel consisting of:

Scott Dietzen, President and CTO, Zimbra
Etay Gafni, Architect, SAP
Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer, Jive Software
Oliver Marks, Senior Project Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Paul Pedrazzi, Oracle AppsLab Director, Oracle
Jay Simons, Senior Director of Product Marketing, BEA Systems

Dan started by asking what added the 2.0 to collaboration in the opinions of the panel members. Scott suggested the contingent mix of push / pull technologies and the use of mashups to improve the user experience. Paul suggested the main difference is putting the focus on the person (rather than the process) and breaking down silo's. Jay suggested useability is the focus, but also noted that the '2.0' technologies are supplementing not supplanting all that went before within the enterprise.

Oliver from Sony made some very interesting points, getting straight to the crux of the matter ! He started by saying that he (like me) dislikes the '2.0' moniker, that in fact '2.0' is the 'norm' at Sony. He went onto to say that they are big on the 'portal' approach, bringing all the applications and information someone needs to do their job together in a portal and so from his point of view any new technologies should be modular, so they can be integrated easily into the portal.

Oliver went on to cover another point, one that I heard discussed many times across the two days and that is one of the main issues for me when it comes to 'enterprise 2.0': to take these app's from consumer space to enterprise space, they must be offered for hosting on the organisations own infrastructure, within the firewall. Indeed, Sony go as far as demanding access to the source code of any app they use ! If they can't get the source code, they go else where (nice to be able to be in that position). I will return to Olivers points in a later summary posting.

Our MC gave his next question to the panel; how do you deal with idea of spreading the 'people centric message' - how do you deal with "yeah, thats cool, really great, now I am going back to my work...."

The responses centered around the use of social networks in the enterprise being all about filtering the signal from the noise, and being about focusing connections within the team, the department the division and maybe outside the enterprise. A comment was made about the fact that an email with a link from a trusted colleague, is probably going to be considered more important than the days top links on digg.

Jay suggested Facebook as an example, is popular because it helps filter the noise - I am not sure I agree, but the OU has not experimented with a private Facebook group yet, but at the moment I more likely to get a zombie or vampire bite than a useful message via Facebook !

Anyway, to finish off a very interesting session, Dan asked one further questions "whats the future vision, where do you see things going" ?

The summary of the responses to this are: current trends might be making things easier, but there is no great paradigm shift, however the 'wisdom of crowds' could provoke such a shift, alongside greater prioritisation and automation of tasks leading to quick and efficient creation of ad hoc workflows.

Knowledge Worker 2.0

Stephen Collins is the founder of AcidLabs and he presented on how the web 2.0 tools impact on knowledge workers to create 'knowledge worker 2.0' (just as an aside, I really, really hate this tacking 2.0 everything.....)

The session focused somewhat on how the web 2.0 technologies can assist either 'bursty' or 'busy' workers (I add a link to reference these terms later). 'Bursty' workers are heavily situational, creative, innovative and intellectually invested in their work, and as such they may be working from anywhere and are not tied to their desks. Thus the web / office 2.0 technologies are effective enablers for this style of working.

However this new wave of knowledge worker are not the horde of generation Y (or 'millenials') often talked about at this conference, but rather individuals of any age whose character predicates them to this working style. I guess I can back this up, as I am 41 and I can work effectively in 'bursty' mode, as do others I know who are both older and younger than myself. However as was noted, these modes of working are not exclusive, you can by 'bursty or busy' depending on the context and the situation.

In the Q & A Facebook came up (again) - there has been a lot of discussion here about whether intermingling work and non work e-life is a good thing, or even a necessary thing. For example the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn. Steve responded that, just as with any other system a business should have policy and procedures for the use of social networking - doing vampire biting on Facebook is obviously not appropriate during office hours ( is it ever appropriate ?)

web 2.0 'the new platforms' session

Chaired by Rafe Needleman, who opened with comments on the integration, or lack thereof between many of the cool web 2.0 app's that we are seeing demo'd here at the conference. Of course to integrate applications requires common or integrated development platforms.

So we got into a conversation ranging over tight or loose integration, at the API or the data level. However it also moved onto the UI -> if even the most keen user of web 2.0 technology can not find a single application that does it 'all' (lets face it that simply does not exist - not even Facebook) how do they bring everything together ? Lets face it the average end user within an enterprise already has enough trouble with different applications with different UI paradigms -but then at least the ubiquitous browser and the move to web based interfaces helps with that.

So it was suggested one way to deal with this is to develop 'widgets' - but personally at the moment I would think the average end user would struggle even with Pageflakes or Netvibes as their 'portal' environment for brining in widgets for their social networking, social bookmarking etc

posting from the iPhone or not......

Although I have managed to log on from the iPhone I had to use the edit HTML box to write this post, however overall I am very impressed with interface and the on screen keyboard, and I know its hardly bleeding edge tech, but hey, I just made a truly mobile blog posting... :-) (Yes, I am easily pleased)

2nd day of Office 2.0

The first session this morning is from Ismael the organiser of the conference on the setup and the actual web 2.0 / Office 2.0 used to facilitate the rapid development and organisation of the conference.

The highlight of this session is really Ismael's closing statement. As it only took a few weeks to organise this years conference, and a lot of time was spent getting the iPhones sorted out, registration for next years conference will open next week !

There is a really good reason for this - there is going to be a competition to build a new device for next years conference ! So the challenge is to design a DVD case sized wireless 'webtop' type device, under a 'hardware open source' licence, running a linux kernel and Firefox !

And I only just got the iPhone working........ :-)

But seriously this is a very, very cool idea. If you can build a device that works, you have a guaranteed beta audience of 600 very geeky conference attendee's to put your machine through its paces.

Classroom 2.0 session

A very large panel that was unfortunately almost bigger than the audience.

Steve Hargadon the moderator is responsible for the Classroom 2.0 site. He had also setup a wiki for this particular session which is at: http://office20ed.wikispaces.com/ and I suggest you jump over there to take a look at the topics and the panel members details.

This was an interesting and wide ranging session, possibly a little school centric for someone from the Higher Eduction (University) sector, but interesting non-the-less. However the topics were varied and discussion 'leaped' around a fair bit, so I might have to sit back and re-read my notes rather then trying to do it all justice here and now.

However the general flavor was one of 'hope' for the use of web 2.0 technologies across the various education sectors for the same reasons the technologies will infiltrate the enterprise, because if educators don't use them with thier students, their students will just use them anyway outside of school time !

Social Networking Session

Chaired by Shel Israel - see http://www.o2con.com/docs/DOC-1103

Anil Dash of Six Apart started with a point reference 'interuptive' technologies such as email or IM, and the fact that these technologies are immediate and demanding of immediate action (if you get hundreds or thousands of emails per day, do you only pay attention to the latest ones at the top of your inbox ?) and so 'meaningful conversations' require 'persistent communications' i.e. blogs and wiki's (not a surprising suggestion from Six Apart !).

Athena Von Oech of Ning said she was surprised how many of the social networks setup on Ning are setup by 'professionals'.

The discussion moved onto the work / life balance and the fact that you using tools like Facebook you can have work and social contacts and communications with them, in the same place ? Is this a good thing or not - well it depends on the context. Why not keep 'professional' contacts in LinkedIn and social contacts / friends in Facebook ?? Do we need a 'social network aggregator' so we don't get confused by mulitple systems and interfaces ? This led to a thread about open standards and how we link such systems together.

quote of the session from Anil ref Facebook : "last year this conversation would have been about Facebook"