At last week’s Collaboration Summit Cisco introduced WebEx Mail, a hosted service built upon its PostPath acquisition. WebEx Mail represents Cisco’s first foray into a market dominated by Microsoft and IBM, with emerging hosted challengers including Google, Zoho (as well as Microsoft and IBM’s own hosted offerings) and Zimbra’s on-premise server. Like other hosted offerings, Cisco bundles security services such as spam and virus filtering into its service. WebEx Mail offers an intriguing option for current Microsoft Exchange shops, but also has some limitations that prospective buyers ought to be aware as they conduct their evaluation.

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Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….

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In case you missed it, Cisco took the wraps off its social/collaboration strategy yesterday at its Collaboration Summit (#ciscocollab) summit in San Francisco. Cisco fired a salvo deep into the territory of Microsoft and IBM Lotus (and to a lesser extent, Google) with its own suite of products covering messaging and social computing. Cisco also introduced numerous video and real-time collaboration products designed to broaden access to its telepresence suite, mate video with WebEx web conferencing, and easily enable inter-company collaboration.

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Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009 just ended and was a huge success!  Thanks to all who attended, all of our speakers and exhibitors, and all of the Enterprise 2.0 staff.  Now it’s time to think about Enterprise 2.0 Boston!  The Call for Papers for E2 Boston 2010 is open now through Friday, December 18^th.   This year we’ve partnered with Spigit, Inc. to create a brand new Call for Papers submissions, collaboration and voting experience in the true spirit of Enterprise 2.0.

You’ll find all of the following information about how to submit on the Call for Papers site but here’s some important items to remember.

First off, you’ll need to sign in and create an account to either make or review a submission. Submissions can be tagged with one of our pre-populated technology topics or a unique topic of the submitter’s choice. Technology areas include:

• Strategy, Planning and Execution
• Driving Adoption and Organizational Change
• Social Tools and Applications for the Enterprise
• Case Studies
• Technology Foundations of Enterprise 2.0
• Social Tools and Applications for the SMB
• Social Media, Marketing and Customer Engagement

The form requires the usual information including a title, description, session format, and all pertinent speaker information. But this time around, all submissions made will be immediately viewable on a discussion forum, allowing for increased transparency in the Call for Papers process.

We encourage all who submit, all who plan on attending Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and give us feedback. Submitters will be allowed to edit their submissions based on this feedback, and can also attach files with supporting materials to submissions. Inviting friends/colleagues to view submissions and publishing your submission to a variety of social networks is also made easy. Lastly, submissions are searchable by technology area, keyword or speaker.

The feedback of the community will be the primary criteria for selecting the sessions for Boston 2010.  In addition to the wisdom of the crowd, creation of a balanced program for the different Technology Areas will be considered.

There are three stages defining the selection process:

Proposal Collection: This is the opening stage. All proposals start in this stage.  Community feedback is encouraged.

Community Vote: This is the second stage. After the Call for Papers closes on December 18^th, the official voting period will begin in January 2010. Proposals will advance to the voting stage when they achieve certain levels of community feedback and approval.

Selected Sessions: This will be the final stage. Advancing here is based on community votes and the approval of members of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board. Proposals with the most votes will be part of the E2 Boston 2010 Conference.

We want the Enterprise 2.0 community to collaborate, give us their most exciting ideas and experiences, and tell us what they want to see in Boston next year.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact mfarrell@techweb.com or (415) 947-6250.  We’re looking forward to reading your submissions and cultivating a meaningful discussion around the experiences and ideas that are the future of Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009 is a wrap! This week has been phenomenal, with tons of press coverage, photos and buzz. Amongst all the great keynotes & general sessions at the conference, I wanted to take a moment to reflect and recognize the Launch Pad program and our Four Finalists.

After making it through two rigorous rounds of voting, CubeTree, The Garland Group, Twiki and XWiki made it to the Final Four and presented live on the keynote stage on Wednesday, November 4, 2009. Each of the presenters had 5 minutes to demo their product, and after each company had their turn, the audience participated in a live text-to-vote, courtesy of our friends at Mozes.

The results tabulated in real-time percentages, and with 42% of the vote, CubeTree was crowned the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Launch Pad winner. When CubeTree’s CEO & Co-Founder was asked to explain how he felt about winning Launch Pad in 140 characters or less, Carlin Wiegner succinctly replied that he was happy. Nice one Carlin.

I wanted to personally thank Steve Wylie, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference GM, for letting me serve as chairperson for the compeition. Big thanks to Carlin, Brad, Jitendra, Milind and Ludovic for doing such a great job and helping to make this program a huge success! Cheers guys.

First published on CloudAve

I’ve been a follower of Helpstream CEO Bob Warfield since before I begun blogging. He’s a super smart, super analytical SaaS commentator who left the world of full time blogging to enjoy the rewards of corporate leadership. I’d have made this session no matter what, the fact it included a bunch of other really smart people provided further justification. Clara Shih is the CEO of Hearsay Labs, Natalie Petouhoff,- is a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research and Wendy Lea is CEO of GetSatisfaction and Phil Fernandez is from Marketo.

Petouhoff gave the analogy of cave drawings from eons ago – when all else is gone the messages remain – hence her perspective that the discussion about support has to occur at a management level. Customer service is broken and we’re in the midst of a perfect storm. years and years of terrible customer service and the emergence of social media are lead to a business transformation. Social media is a catalyst for change within an organization.

Fernandez explained that Marketo had active support from its inception – it’s an essential part of their customer support portal for both inbound and self service support contact. He gave an example of case diversion during the recent release of their updated offering. The inbound support ticket mix is changing between phone, email and web. Approx two thirds are human assisted while the remainder are self-service.

Lea talked about the Get Satisfaction freemium model and that they encourage their users to build community wherever is most appropriate for them – whether it’s on their own site, in Facebook or wherever.

Warfield explained that Helpstream is trying to combine social and process – creating a repeatable process around social interactions.

The panel discussed ComcastCares and how just showing customers that an organization cares is so important. Petouhoff talked about the fact that customer service departments are continually told to do more with less – they’re not supported in their role. Lea explained that the majority of people signing up for GetSatisfaction are doing so to use it for feedback – marketing and customer support need to be integrated. Warfield explained that the customers really want an integrated experience with a company.

Warfield discussed the concept of “deflection” where customer services aim is to have their customers NOT engage with customer services. The trick is to integrate the inbound communications and therefore have customer support become an asset rather than a cost to the organization.

Petouhoff discussed the need for openness, honesty and authenticity. The conversations are occurring anyway, it’s important for companies to embrace and engage with them. She gave some statistics about customer retention in the case of good support – it’s apparently 65% higher than otherwise.

Lea gave the example of Nike running who for $8000 per annum got a GetSatisfaction widget that has drawn huge content that is invaluable to the organization for product development. Warfield used an example of InfusionSoft who have leveraged Helpstream to capture the voice and sentiment of the community.

Lea contends that social media is shifting communications to a much more “natural language” approach – less guard and beating around the bush and more openness and honesty. Again the themes of authenticity, naturalness and honesty. Warfield concurred, saying that social media is just about people – people doing what they do in real life.

A great session with much agreement around the table…

This is the one in answer to a recent post by provocateur Dennis Howlett in which Howlett asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is in fact a crock. Moderated by David Berlind from TechWeb he had a bevvy of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners.

Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types – except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then – where are the use cases? I’d like to know.

Five principles;

• Workforce transformation
• Business process/operations
• Intellectual property/Privacy/governance
• Religious wars (technology/generational biases)
• Bottom line business benefits

Greg Lowe from Alcatel-Lucent talked about their desire to unlock institutionalized knowledge and enable collaboration. Berlind asks why that desire is any different now from in the past. Lowe’s answer was that tools and technologies available today enable those aims. Claire Flanagan from CSC and Bruce Galinsky from Metlife agreed that it’s the technologies that really enable the promise of sharing and co-creating.

Berlind asks how that actually transforms the workforce. Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton says this is happening no matter – expectations are higher on both the organization’s and the employee’s sides. Enterprise 2.0 technologies are enabling that to happen faster, better and more readily.

Berlind asked about the cultural change that needs to occur within an organization. Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly agreed and said that they see Enterprise 2.0 as a gateway to moving the organization into a more open approach – it’s the “starter drug” to get the organization hooked on open communications.

Jamie Pappas from EMC mentioned that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a cure all or fix all – it’s an enabler and relies on the advocates throughout the organization to adopt it.

Much discussion about business process – have we hit the wall in terms of agility? No – it’s just baby steps and there are profound benefits yet to be realized.

Governance, there is a culture shift happening and the technology needs to keep up. One good approach can be called “participatory governance” where those who have skin in the game develop the governance models for those tools but do so in concert with the traditional governance approached.

The intellectual property concerns. All panelists agreed that organizations need to stop not trusting their employees. People are generally inherently good and those who are not will always find ways to maliciously expose data. Sure put good governance in place but beyond that trust the people to do the right thing. “I can’t stop you from doing stupid things but I can make it visible when you do them”.

In terms of the business value the difficulty is that its very hard to show true metrics for the gains that can be made form enterprise 2.0 – there are significant anecdotal benefits that need to be extrapolated to an organization-wide benefit. Booz Allen Hamilton gave an example where a 3000 employee reply-all email was analyzed and once the cost of people replying and unsubscribing was taken into account, there was an internal cost of $250000 – enterprise 2.0 can solve many of those issues. Extrapolating that up through the organization, the contention is that if a simple thing like reply-all can create such costs for an organization, high level operations can drive huge benefits.

It was very much a case of the converted preaching to the converted – it’ll be interesting to see what the originator of the title has to say about what the panelists had to offer.

The one we’d all been waiting for – ever since the Rasmussen brothers announced Wave at Google I/O in May, we’ve been waiting for some hard examples of the power that Wave can bring. Gregory D’Alesandre (Dr Wave), Product Manager for Google Wave ran presented three examples of Wave integrations from Novell, ThoughtWorks and SAP.

Every time you use any sort of communication technology you’re trying to achieve a goal, to get something done. With Google Wave the idea is that rather than understanding the “end goal”, users can start a Wave which can conform with the shifting objectives over time. D’Alesandre gave an introduction to Wave for the one or two people in the audience who haven’t seen it before. He explained that Google use Wave internally a lot and they find that all current communication technologies are a poor replacement for face to face interactions however every now and ten it’s better to interact electronically (he gave the example of a 12 person meeting with everyone trying to talk at the same time) – Wave enables this mass interaction without so much noise (although I’d have to say it does introduce significant dissonance as heavy users of multiple person IM will know).

The Wave team has purposely avoided giving lots of lock-down options to Wave – if you allow people to lock their content down, Wave becomes very email-like – openness and flexibility increases the collaborative potential.

D’Alesandre talked about Wave as a platform and invited their platform partners to show their offerings.

First up Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager from SAP who demoed two gadgets that SAP has built – Gravity is a gadget that allows business process modeling to be collaboratively built. See the demo video below;

Second up, Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks demoed the integration of Wave with a software development project management tool. I covered the offering in more depth in another post but basically it allows for tasks to be created relating to a project all from within Wave and have them reflected in the project management tool. As I said in my post – this integration doesn’t show much more than could be achieved with a standard email/PM integration.

And lastly Andy Fox, Vice President Engineering from Novell showed their integration using the Wave federation protocol – Pulse. Pulse aggregates multi channel communication as well as a list of relevant contacts – it’s effectively a social CRM/communication offering. It brought to mind Gist’s offering and, while it helps aggregate lots of data, it does little to ease the burden of the firehose of information. The addition it does bring is the enablement of visibility in real time – but it does raise some question as to the value of asynchronous vs synchronous communications.

Some interesting integrations… but yet again nothing entirely ground breaking.

First posted on CloudAve

Andrew McAfee, from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, believes we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of the tools and techniques of enterprise 2.0.

McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas – “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features – “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
• Overuse the word “social”

Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.

First posted on CloudAve

A live blog of the presentation….

Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, and Alina Fu, Product Manager, Social Computing talk about the SharePoint 2010 offering.

An interesting approach – Christian and Alina ran a “speed dating” session trying to message the major thrust of 2010. Christian pushed the big customers who use SharePoint to collaborate and, with honesty, admitted the failings of an ActiveX-centric approach.

Personal connections, finding subject matter experts, consumer features for the enterprise. 2010 has a dynamic newsfeed directly to an individual site. Personal profiling linked with contextual search.

2010 has a better user experience across blogs and wikis – unleashing the creativity of the users. Enabling the use of podcasts within the product.

User rating and commenting of content inside or outside of SharePoint. Tagging linked to newsfeeds.

The security question – “It’s Microsoft so it’s safe”. Content management extends to the social media content.

Flexibility – 2010 enables advances customization, within the browser for an individual user or a team. A full range of APIs and tools to customize the look, feel and functionality.

And the speed date is over… And the audience goes wild… (not so much)