Recap from Enterprise 2.0 Conference:

I've attended 2 days of the conference and it was interesting and productive.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. The overall tone was very optimistic about the benefits that collaboration can bring the enterprise and tat compared to previous shifts, it is relatively inexpensive and can be done one piece at a time
   
2. Forrester research estimates the market size for enterprise 2.0 to be 4.6 billion by 2013
   
3. Beyond many benefits that were discussed, like fostering innovation, improved knowledge management, improved sense of community in the company and employee engagement, the overall consensus was that this change is inevitable. It is not so much a manner of what benefits will the company gain from introducing these tools but that by 2014 50% of the workforce will be consisted of Gen Y workers and that is the way they expect to interact and work.
   
4. The gap that exists right now between the home environment and the office environment (where for the first time, people have a more sophisticated and rich environment at home) will force companies to match the conditions and tools that prevail outside.
   
5. Measures of success: are very different based on the industry. While Sony are seeing participation levels of over 50%, Pfizer are very happy to have 10% of the workforce participate.
   
6. While everyone acknowledged that these changes go well beyond tools and technologies, very little was actually discussed regarding leading the cultural change. The majority opinion was:
   
   1. Build and make them easy to use
      
   2. Lead by example: move your activity there and expect everyone to follow
      
   3. Put the use of these tools in the line of business so everyone understands that is the way to get things done.
      
   4. Do not despair and keep on going. Change will happen.
      
7. The exact tool does not matter. It is true that your investment and level of effort will differ but at the end of the day, you can make any toolset work for you.
   
8. Common approaches:
   
   1. Sharepoint+. Since Microsoft provide corporate licenses that give companies free licenses to sharepoint. It is the most commonly deployed and used platform. It is also one of the weakest and many vendors offer additions and enhancements that make it more user friendly and add missing features. I really liked NewsGator that have a platform that sits on top of the sharepoint installation and makes it a kickass tool.
      
   2. OpenSource: many companies have taken multiple open source products (there are thousands) and integrated them together. A new company has taken Drupal, one of the strongest open source portal platforms and added 30 of the best products into its framework and will offer it free as open source social platform.
      
   3. Custom platforms like Jive offer very user friendly and feature rich collaboration tools but as with any proprietary local software – you have product limitations you cannot code your way around.
      
   4. SaaS providers – vendors that will host everything for you. Some with good API's
      
9. Security and access concerns in large companies were that hardest to resolve. In Sony, it took 6 months to build and 12 months to get the security plan approved.
   
10. Oracle and IBM are making a strong move into the space. IBM release a set of tools based on Notes for collaboration and will launch a toolset for Mashups in a few months. Oracle is launching its WebCenter platform that will include social computing aspects and …Mashups as well.
    
11. Many providers offer turnkey solutions for customer community.