There’s a lot of speculation on various blogs about Google’s acquisition of DocVerse, a startup founded by former Microsoft employees to enable co-authoring of MS Office documents. Most of the discussion has focused on the potential of Google integrating DocVerse into its apps portfolio, but given the chasm in terms of feature/functionality between Google Apps and Microsoft Office, it doesn’t seem that the idea of a MS Office and Google App user co-authoring a document is going to be feasible anytime soon.

Instead, is it possible that Google aims to position DocVerse as a hosted alternative to SharePoint for workgroup collaboratation, delivering a Wave-like functionality that integrates with Microsoft Office as a separate service from its Apps? The universe of Microsoft Office users is a massive order of magnitude larger than those using Google Apps, or who will use Google Apps in the next few years, so why not challenge Microsoft’s two big growth engines - SharePoint, and the forthcoming Office Live Workspace to provide a real-time collaboration capability compatible with Microsoft’s desktop suite?

Tags: Collaboration, Google, Microsoft

Registration for E2 Boston 2010 opened a couple of weeks ago and we’re now deep in the process of finalizing the E2 Conference agenda. First off, this week we announced several keynote speakers including:

• Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext
• Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management
• JP Rangaswami, CIO and Chief Scientist, BT Design
• Murali Sitaram, Vice President and General Manager, Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform
• Gentry Underwood, IDEO

There will be more several more keynote speaker announcements in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

This year the conference agenda will cover the entire Enterprise 2.0 lifecycle including strategy, execution and performance monitoring. It will focus on business value and will feature conference sessions organized around the following brand new tracks:

• Set Your Enterprise 2.0 Strategy
• Social Business Applications and Platforms Track
• Using Search to Tame Complexity and Discover Opportunity
• Socializing With Video: How Emerging Video Applications Will Impact Enterprise Collaboration
• Integrating Social Media & Community Approaches
• Delivery Strategies: Deploying, Connecting and Mobilizing
• Adoption in the Enterprise for Practitioners

Conference sessions for each of these tracks will be announced in the coming weeks. For those of you who made submissions via the Call for Papers and made it to the Community Selected stage of the process, thank you for your patience. Our Advisory Board is reviewing the E2 Community’s 100 top voted for sessions, and winners will be contacted very soon.

While creating and selecting conference sessions for these seven tracks, we’ve focused on providing practical steps and case studies that will drive business value inside the enterprise. We plan to examine the entire Enterprise 2.0 lifecycle, focusing specifically on how deeply Enterprise 2.0 is able to permeate the many layers of business processes and the people that comprise them.

Looking forward to announcing the winners of the Call for Papers and sharing the finalized agenda for the Conference with everyone. Feel free to contact me at mfarrell@techweb.com or (415) 947-6250 with any questions or concerns.

Salesforce.com’s Chatter social computing service is now available to a limited number of private beta participants. Salesforce.com’s first shot across the social computing bow was fired back in November when they announced the service, now that the wraps are coming off we’ll see if Salesforce can compete against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, a plethora of emerging vendors, and even Cisco.

I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.

Tags: cloud, Collaboration, Salesforce, social computing

Google today announced “Buzz“, their attempt to merge the worlds of social computing with e-mail. Buzz adds social tracking features to your in-box, allowing you to see the social activity of your contacts. So what’s not to like?

I think the biggest issue with Buzz is its reliance on Gmail. Google makes the assumption that your e-mail contacts are your buddies, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve got a lot of folks in my in-box who are business or casual acquaintances, or whom are on mailing lists that I’m on, and who aren’t friends I’d want to follow. The people I want to follow are all in my Facebook account, but Google doesn’t yet connect to Facebook. If there’s a “killer app” that will move people from Facebook to Google, I don’t see it.   Buzz may have some use as another social computing channel, but at this point I don’t see it replacing Facebook (or even LinkedIn).

Where Buzz, I think, has the greatest appeal is in creating a social community within companies using Gmail or Google apps as their corporate messaging environment. Buzz just fired a shot across the bow of all the social computing software or service vendors targeting SMBs. If you are already paying for a corporate Gmail service, you just got a whole suite of social tools as well.

There is one other problem, it doesn’t work. At this point I don’t see the “Buzz” link in my Gmail in-box, and from following various twitter comments, neither do many others.

Update: Buzz has a massive privacy flaw

Tags: Collaboration, Google

What happens when an investor “friends” his broker or agent and they use Facebook chat or e-mail to discuss account activities? This sort of scenario sends shivers through the spine of those responsible for compliance in the financial services sector. We’ve seen a huge market develop around compliance enforcement for e-mail and IM, now those same concerns are extending into the social space.

FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, issued new guidelines this week designed to help financial firms balance the need to enter the social world with the need to meet electronic records retention rules. The problem for enforcement managers so far has been the lack of tools. While companies such as Facetime Communications have introduced social site enforcement gateways, it remains difficult to cover all the bases as social sites rapidly grow. Ultimately the heart of any successful compliance strategy is user training and a solid acceptable use policy for those accessing social sites. Financial firms would be wise to carefully read FINRA’s recommendations and proactively take measure to limit their risk.

Tags: Compliance, e2.0, Social

First published at CloudAve

At last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the highlight presentation for me was one given by Kathleen Culver and Greg Lowe from Alcatel Lucent. Their presentation was an excellent look at some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0, and then some of the detrimental impacts that those benefits can bring.

Last week I posted about one of these very pitfalls, telling the tale of social media being used in a professional setting by a bully trying to build themselves up by dragging others down. Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council founding member, practitioner and thought-leader Susan Scrupski left a comment reminding me of the presentation Greg and Kathleen gave. I reached out to Greg who graciously agreed to let me use the presentation and write a blog post around it.

What’s interesting for me about their presentation is that, despite there being some skepticism about Enterprise 2.0 generally, most commentators are couching that skepticism in terms of “where is the value” type questions – looking to prove the real benefit from the tools we’re all evangelizing, These commentators tend to be a little hypocritical, using these social media tools to build their own personal brands while at the same time pouring scorn on the value of the same tools within the enterprise.

Kathleen and Greg however take the benefits the tools bring as a given, but then parse those benefits in terms of some real risks that go alongside them. They do so along several themes – flexibility, accessibility (both geographical and chronological, context specificity, information availability and retrievability.

It’s an excellent presentation and well worth a few minutes viewing.

Key is their summary – bear in mind these are two Enterprise 2.0 proponents who, despite understanding the risks, still see the value in the tools. Their advice in order to mitigate the risks?

• Avoid “Alert Fatigue”
• Unplug yourself
• Focus on your audience
• Make your smile count (in person)
• Don’t be stupid (watch what you type)

Kathleen helpfully provided a link to the references they used in the talk. Again this reiterates a bit of a theme of mine relating to the perils of enterprise 2.0  definitely not a reason to avoid using the tools but something to bear in mind.

As part of a new offering that fellow CloudAve blogger Krishnan Subramanian and I are developing, I’m looking at doing some work in this space in the next few months – hoping to develop some whitepapers and practitioner guides touching on these issues – watch this space for more.

Tags: enterprise 2.0, greg lowe, kathleen culver, susan scrupski

Recently Krishnan Subramanian and I were talking about writing a series of whitepapers as a guide for organizations looking to adopt technology – there’s many highly technical documents on offer but something worded more as a “10 easy steps” type series was what we envisaged for this particular offering. To use the term coined by another commentator in this space – we’re looking to be the advocates for the users of this stuff.

Fortuitously we both met up with MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson at the defrag conference in May and we mentioned to him what we were looking at doing. He saw the value in our approach and agreed to support us in the writing of our first paper which looks at the key things that prospective buyers of collaboration software need to ask.

The ten questions are detailed below:

• Is your product extensible to meet the changing face of the collaboration landscape?
• Does Your Product Support Standard Governance Frameworks?
• Does Your Collaboration Product Integrate with My Existing Technology Landscape?
• How Does Your Product Support Access Standards?
• How Flexible Are Your Data Location Requirements?
• How Does Your Product Administer Security?
• Is Your Product Standards Compliant?
• Can Your Product Scale With Our Planned Adoption Rates?
• How Robust Is Your Solution?
• How Viable Is Your Business Model?

You can download the whitepaper in full here. Thanks to MindTouch for supporting the creation of this paper and if you’d like to talk about ways we can help clarify what customers really need to think about when it comes to SaaS, Cloud, Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 generally, feel free to get in touch.

We’ve been fielding a lot of questions about the schedule for Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference and, at long last, we are now ready to unveil the program schedule - minus full details on the Microsoft keynote.

Between sessions, check out the Expo Floor and network with other attendees in the lounge - just like at a physical event.  Be sure to stop by the Enterprise 2.0 Conference booth and say hi too.

… and remember this is all free.

10:30 am (All times are Eastern Standard Time)

Doors Open - Network with other attendees in the lounge, take a first trip through the Expo Floor and get a feel for the user interface.

11:00 am

Opening Keynote - Head over to the Keynote Hall to hear from Morten T. Hansen, Professor, University of California Berkeley, School of Information and Author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results

12:00 pm

Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise 2.0 - Oliver Marks & Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group discuss the stages from inception to completion that form the gateways to successful justification, budget allocation and roll out.  The session will provide guidance on how to plan, internally sell, design, develop and launch Enterprise 2.0 initiatives that will provide tangible business value to your organization.

1:00 pm

Building an Interactive Enterprise - Join Louis Richardson, Worldwide Sales Executive, Social Software from IBM, as he reviews what IBM is doing to challenge people to think differently and do business differently. Learn how to create an interactive office environment with enterprise 2.0 capabilities that can bring people and content together quickly, integrate them into existing business processes, support high performance teaming, and drive faster decision making across the value chain of your organization.

1:30 pm

IBM Meet the Expert Q&A - Head over to the IBM booth for an in-depth Q&A session with Martha Mealy from IBM Lotus Market Management.

2:00 pm

Microsoft Keynote - TBA

2:30 pm

Microsoft Q&A Session - Who doesn’t have questions for Microsoft? This is your chance to ask them directly.

3:00 pm

Social Software Tools: A Critical Evaluation - To date, technology analysts have quite properly focused on the social and business aspects of social software. And yet, social software tools (including collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, and revamped portal products from major vendors) differ quite substantially in maturity, approach, and support. This session will share customer research from noted evaluation firm CMS Watch on leading social software technologies, and provide a framework for customers to evaluate the marketplace based on their own needs. Presented by Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch.

4:00 pm

Hello Again: The Evolution of Hello.bah.com - The 2009 Open Enterprise Award winner, Booz Allen Hamilton, is an organization well versed in leveraging Enterprise 2.0.  In this session, learn how Booz Allen’s Hello.bah.com platform is evolving. From the tools leveraged to their approach to policy, governance, and user support, Hello, like many Enterprise 2.0 implementations, is changing as it is integrated into the fabric of the organization.  Presented by Walton Smith, Senior Associate & Megan Murray,  Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton

6:00 pm

Event Closes

At this week’s Lotusphere IBM introduced “Project Vulcan“, it’s road-map for integrating public and private collaboration and social communities into an extensible set of user interfaces. Ed Brill notes that Vulcan “is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going.” Vulcan continues a trend by IBM to merge Notes into public social networks, highlighted by last year’s announcement of LinkedIn integration with Notes.

IBM’s announcement, coupled with Cisco’s recent introduction of public social hooks into its Enterprise Collaboration Platform demonstrate a continued convergence of public and private social networks. These moves highlight the reality that social network such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are increasingly used for legitimate business purposes rather than for entertainment or catching up with friends and family, but they also raise alarms for those responsible for governance, compliance, and security. I expect that over the next year we’ll see a continued battle between those responsible for information protection and those looking to improve collaboration. Vendors can help their odds of success by addressing compliance concerns up front.

Tags: Cisco, Compliance, IBM Lotus, Social

First published on CloudAve.com

I have a friend called Jennifer (name and details changed, obviously). At school she was a loner without many friend who, as loners often do, overcome loneliness by bullying smaller kids in the playground. Jennifer managed to gain “friends” by doing this, although they weren’t really friends, rather individuals who were scared that they’d become the target unless they joined in with Jennifer’s shenanigans.

Well, luckily for her schoolmates, Jennifer grew up, studies and entered the workforce where she was forced, at least to a certain extent, to forego her bullying behavior in the interests of fairness, due process and the common good.

Until today that is…

You see the advent of social media in its various guises has given Jennifer the opportunity to once again throw her weight around and make life difficult for others. Involved in a part of an organization that makes extensive use of social media type tools, Jennifer has a wide following in her vocational field and uses this following to bully others the way she used to use her heft to do so all those years ago in the schoolyard.

Now my enterprise friends will tell me bullying in the work place has always existed but social media and enterprise 2.0 tools have extended the reach an individual can communicative with – this is an unquestionably great thing when it comes to collaborating on specific projects, but it’s also a dangerous thing when used inappropriately.

I’ve spent long time talking with Enterprise 2.0 practitioners, attending enterprise 2.0 events and hearing about the barriers to adoption. Generally we’re grasping to find either good case study examples of enterprise 2.0 being put to work or fixes for the oft mentioned barriers to adoption – none of however 9at least in public) are prepared to front up and tell the stories of Enterprise 2.0 gone wrong and used for ugly purposes.

And in this we run a real risk – by burying our heads in the sane and not “outing” the dark side of social media, we play into the hands of those who view the blogosphere, Twitter and social media generally as a complete waste of space. If we don’t tell the stories, and develop ways of avoiding the pitfalls these tools enable, they’ll use the same tales to discount E20 outright.

So here’s a plaintive call to those using social media generally and Enterprise 2.0 tools more specifically: Don’t hide the use-cases that feel uncomfortable, rather use them as case studies, develop solutions and show that like a community of old, so too can a virtual community stand up and police its own.

Everyone would be a little happier if we did that…

Tags: enterprise 2.0, Social Media