Enterprise 2.0 conference day 1: social software platforms, implementations and cloudcomputing

After a sunday where Boston turned green to support the Celtics in Game 2 in the NBA Filals, I attended three sessions at the enterprise 2.0 conference: Social Computingplatforms eg IBM vs Micorsoft, Implementing e2.0 by Dion Hinchcliffe and An evening in the cloud.

The first session was introduced by Mike Gotta, analyst at the burton group. He stated that social computing consisted of three aspects: devices, user experiences and social relations. IBM and Microsoft demonstrated a use case and the core functionality of their products. The main difference between the Lotus Connections and the Sharepoint platforms is that the first has finished functionality whereas the latter is more customizable. Microsoft depends on third party vendors to add functions to the platform. It was a pity that both did not have any real cases to show. The new Connections platform will launch at the end of this week and looks really promising. The next version of Sharepoint will surely have an update on the UI. IBM showed a pretty cool social networking feature wich displays a nice grafical realtime network graph for people and topics. It still is a pity this feature did not make it in Sharepoint after the beta testing was through!

After lunch Dion Hinchcliffe took the stage and updated us on Enteprise 2.0. The theme is clearly making ground. Last year only 3 people from the public could start a blog or a wiki on the intranet, today over 60% could! Google analytics showed more attention to wikis and blogs over the last two years then on phones and emails! Once more the concept that E2.0 tools are not replacing existing tools was evident. Enteprise Search and Linking (the first two letters en SLATES) are really bothered by the fact that corporate content is not centralized and webbased! So not all content can be discovered and linked! This is putting a drag on these two important features of an E2.0 platform. Authorship and tagging are for providing content and structure. Extensions and signals are for leveraging the E2.0 platform.

Dion argues the cluetrain manifesto is still a groundbreaking book and sets the standard on enterprise 2.0. I have already putt it on my to-read-list, if you read the first few theses in the book you will understand! One other insight that came up during this session was the fast that coporate taxonomy and folksonomy can go hand in hand! The taxonomy to provide some upfront structure and the folksonomy to explain the taxonomy in plain language. E2.0 makes the conversations in your organization reusable for the future and in effect making implicit knowledge explicit, only by capturing the content in a very natural way for the enduser.

The third session was about cloud computing. Google, Amazon and Salesforce argued with a couple of CxO's about the question whether it would be possible to run a company purely in the cloud. These company have an IT infrastructure in place that is second to none. The way Google makes it possible to have a blobal marketshare around 70% in search is compelling. Your company can make use if this infrastructure on a moments notice. The idea is that is more effective to outsource this function as well! The risk in doing this is the same in the choice between driving and flying. Where flying seems to be more dangereous but driving actually is. One other contra-argument should be that cloudcomputing is not enterprise class, but only listen to what google got in place and this is no argument. The privacy issue seems a big one but you have to figure this out anyhow and has nothing to dot with the choice for cloud computing. One other issue was the patriot act! Google stores all content in servers in the US and are subject to the partiot act, thus everything can be read by the US Government...

Wrapping the day up, IBM Connections was really great. Implementation of enteprise 2.0 is still searching for the design principles and cloud computing looks nice but has a lot of evangelism to get it started!

Tomorrow the keynotes get underway and a lot of casestudyies get underway! And of course game 3 in the Finals ;-)