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Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Evening In the Cloud

Today was the first day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  Unfortunately, I only have an Expo pass, so I wasn't able to attend the majority of Monday's sessions.  However, I was able to attend the Evening in the Cloud session that took place at 4:00pm.

From the description: David Berlind will open the program with a 30 minute overview of the cloud collaboration market, the major players in the market and touch on why the market is changing so rapidly.

The "major players", unfortunately, were limited to Microsoft and Google.  Rather amusing considering that the event was sponsored by IBM.  The talk was rather high-level, and the key takeaways were as follows:
  • How could an ideal cloud application improve collaboration? David began with a nice "what if" scenario in which a person just opened a word processing application and was able to save the document, share it, send it, publish it, etc. all from one spot.  He then posed the question as to whether this was best handled by a cloud solution or traditional software.
  • What are Microsoft & Google (the major players) doing? A year ago, it appeared that Microsoft and Google were headed in opposite directions.  MS was defending its installed software turf (MSOffice & Sharepoint) while Google was pushing for an exclusive cloud application solution (GApps & Gears).  Now, they're both moving toward a middle.  MS is offering a Sharepoint cloud service and has already started testing the waters with MSOffice Live.  Google has now dropped Gears (bye-bye Google offline support), has improved its MS-to-GDocs conversion, and now supports non-converted documents to be uploaded to GApps.
  • What is the cloud vs. software trend in the market? This appears to be the trend: Embrace this hybrid approach between desktop software and cloud applications.  Jive already addresses this with their MSOffice push/pull plugin.  Companies aren't yet willing to divest from their installed software solutions (for many reasons), and the cloud solutions cannot yet provide all the answers.  So, the current trend is to facilitate collaboration that spans both the desktop and cloud environments.
  • Why is the rise of activity streams important? This is perhaps the most significant shift in enterprise collaboration.  The activity stream is a powerful utility for bringing relevant information to peoples' attention.  However, many challenges yet remain for activity streams, and nobody has quite figured out how to make "the secret sauce" yet:
    • Activity streams must be easy to manage.  Too much information is noise.  If you subscribe to too many channels (spaces, people, content), you'll be overwhelmed with information.
    • Activity streams must enable work to transpire in the stream.  Links away from the stream are not necessarily a good thing.  People should just be able to get their work done from where ever they are notified of important developments.
    • Activity streams are a major component of the "Collaboration Backbone" of the enterprise.  Closed, proprietery document formats are falling out of favor.  The interplay between MSO and GDocs illustrate this.  If something is formatted properly in one medium, it should be formatted properly (and all content preserved) in another.  Information formats for content are quickly ceasing to be the "lock in" for E2.0 vendors.  Rather, it is the Activity Stream, notifications, relationships between entities, analytics, etc. that is becoming the new "lock in".  Sure, you can get all your data out of a new system.  But you can't get all of that relational/notification data out.  That is collaboration backbone, and is the secret sauce in the mix.

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