Pundits have been proclaiming the imminent arrival of the paperless office since the 1970s. So far, they’ve been wrong. If anything, we print more today than we did back then.

Yet some still believe in this; those who engage in looking for the paperless office may be engaging in a Sisyphean task.

The New York Times ran a story on February 10 by Hannah Fairfield entitled “Pushing Paper Out the Door.” It speaks of paper-reducing technologies in homes and offices, citing families who scan their bills and opt for on-line statements. To Fairfield I say “not so fast.”

Indeed Fairfield quotes Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive: “Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is. Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”

To respond directly to Kahle: “last week.”

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Looking at the hundreds of responses to our New Workplace Challenges survey (if you haven’t taken it yet, click here to take the survey today), we find that almost 70% of knowledge workers surveyed do work during times that traditionally have been “personal time.”

The comments have been telling and I’d like to share a few with you. The question we posed was “Please describe how you prevent the work-life line from blurring.”

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This week was the 15th annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida.  It was my 15th as well, although my count includes three Lotuspheres in Europe.  

IBM unleashed a fire hose of announcements at the opening general session.  We’ll try to walk through the most interesting ones here.  It’s a lot of material but you should read through it regardless of whether you use mostly IBM tools or mostly Microsoft tools as there are implications here for all.

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In December 2003, Basex named spam e-mail our Product-of-the-Year for 2004, explaining that this was akin to Time magazine’s naming Adolf Hitler Man of the Year in 1938.  Spam, we wrote back then, was "a disruptive force that has had a major impact on almost everyone who uses a computer." 

The Product-of-the-Year designation is meant to recognize technologies that have had a major impact on how we work using information technology - and nothing has had a more profound effect than the disruptive nature of spam.  Until now, that is.

This week Basex named Information Overload as the 2008 Problem-of-the-Year.

Whether sitting at a desk in the office, in a conference room, in one’s home office, or at a client, the likelihood of being able to complete a task (what many call "work") without interruption is nil.  Content creation has gone off the charts and new forms of content are being pushed towards us at a rapid pace.  It’s not just e-mail, junk mail, text messages, phone calls, and monthly reports anymore.

Intel, a company with 94,000 employees, sees Information Overload as a serious problem.  "At Intel we estimated the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week," says Nathan Zeldes, a Principal Engineer focusing on computing productivity issues at Intel.  "We are now looking at applying new work behaviors that can help reduce this impact".

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, a senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation, sees Information Overload as an impediment to getting her work done.  "We are more connected than ever, but we must manage not only our connections but also the increasing volumes of information flowing over them.  We continue to sort useful mail from junk mail, but we are additionally stressed by sorting useful phone calls from junk calls, useful email from spam, and in general useful from useless (and even dangerous) information.  To get really important work done, I find it helpful to take a holiday from my connections so that I can focus on the work at hand."

We believe that 2008 will be the year we begin to solve the problem of information overload in a substantive way.  

In conjunction with the Problem-of-the-Year announcement, Basex is announcing a survey on information overload and today’s work environment challenges.  Ironically, the latest office productivity tools designed to increase productivity are often having the opposite effect.

The survey can be found at http://www.basex.com/btwiosurv1 and survey takers are eligible to win a Palm Treo 750 smartphone with Windows Mobile 6.

Please take the survey today and feel free to share this link with colleagues.  The more input we get via the survey, the more we can do to solve the problem of Information Overload together.

As I was posting this here, The New York Times published a piece on Information Overload  - take  a look by clicking here.

If you are in the enterprise software business and your competition has a major product that not only has 95% of the market but is so standard that many think no work can be done without it, what would you do?  If you are IBM and the competitive product is Microsoft Office (which is second only to the Microsoft Windows operating system as a profit maker for the company), you would create a free, open-source suite of applications backed by IBM.  In a move reminiscent of IBM’s support of Linux, which it began to support in 2000 and which now competes with Microsoft’s Windows server software in the enterprise market, IBM introduced IBM Lotus Symphony, a word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation suite.  IBM executives encourage this comparison, which is likely to cause some companies to rethink their plans for deploying Microsoft Office 2007.

IBM has tried to compete with Microsoft before, most notably with its OS/2 operating system and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite.  This week’s introduction was different even though some observers (myself included) had a sense of déjà vu given Lotus’ 1985 launch of a similar product with the Symphony name. (Lotus Symphony, an MS-DOS-based integrated suite that combined word processing, spreadsheet, business graphics, data management, and communications capabilities.  Lotus Jazz was its Apple Macintosh sibling.)Free office productivity software is nothing new.  Indeed, Lotus Symphony is based on open-source software developed by a consortium known as OpenOffice.org, whose code goes back to Star Division, a German company that was giving away Star Office, which included a word processor, database application, drawing software, an e-mail client, and a spreadsheet, available in seven languages and for the Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, Linux, and Sun Solaris operating system.

Sun Microsystems, which purchased Star Division in 1999, and Google, already offer free desktop productivity tools based on OpenOffice.  

Lotus Symphony, ca. 2007, is not just for processing words and crunching numbers.  The new offering supports OpenDocument Format, or ODF, which is based on XML, a protocol that enables information exchange between computers.  Using ODF, Basex could publish reports that update automatically by being linked to databases that we would keep current.

Microsoft also supports XML, but via its own document format, Office Open XML.  Regular readers will recall that, earlier this month, Microsoft’s bid to have Open Office XML ratified as a standard by ISO failed.  The OpenDocument Format , the one backed by IBM, Google, Sun, among others, was approved by the ISO in 2006.

Let the music begin.

Microsoft announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Parlano, a collaboration company that focuses on enterprise group chat applications.  Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in Q4 2007, were not disclosed.  Following the closing, members of the Parlano team will join the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus.

Parlano, Italian for "they speak," developed MindAlign, a technology that supports persistent discussions, i.e. those that persist over a long period of time.  The application was originally envisaged at Swiss Bank (now UBS) and led to the company’s formation.  I recall the announcement, in September of 2000, proclaiming a "new class" of business tools. 

"In order for organizations to realize faster and better use of information, a whole new class of business collaboration solutions is required," said Tim Krauskopf, CEO of Parlano at the time. (Krauskopf was a co-founder of Spyglass, an early developer of Web browser technology.)

Parlano had a clear vision of its mission at the company’s inception and, despite the vagaries of the marketplace, it managed to follow through on this vision without any detours.  Indeed, the company continuously improved the group chat experience, developing products that could be integrated into a Collaborative Business Environment such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

In 2004, Basex recognized Parlano and MindAlign with a Basex Excellence Award, or Basey, noting that the application could "change the face of communications for organizations with a distributed workforce that crosses time zones and borders."  According to customers we spoke with, it did.

In 2006, Microsoft credited MindAlign with the creation of "a new paradigm for collaborative software" in a book called "Innovation Starts Here," published by Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team.  

Now, going one step further, Microsoft announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire the company and its technology.

Parlano’s vision ties directly into what Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh-Pall commented about the deal: "The acquisition of Parlano and the integration of its leading group chat application will advance Microsoft’s vision to use the power of software to deliver the most complete unified communications experience."

Nick Fera, Parlano’s current CEO who was vice president of business development back in September 2000, commented this evening in his Weblog about Singh-Pall’s statement, noting that "[O]f course we share that view and are excited to see MindAlign become an enormous commercial reality and success.  Microsoft is soon to inherent a team of talented and passionate professionals who really understand the value of group chat."

Yesterday, IBM announced general availability of Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8.  Previously code-named "Hannover," the new version, which supports composite applications and uses the Eclipse framework, replaces both Lotus Notes version 7.x as well as the Workplace tools IBM offered in recent years.  The Notes client will support enterprise mash-ups, linking multiple systems together in a variety of ways to provide better and more contextual information to knowledge workers.  The Notes 8 client runs on Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.

 We’ve spoken to our clients who have been testing R8 and they tell us it is changing how many of their knowledge workers work and interact.  Notes 8 moves the locus of one’s work from e-mail to collaboration and this is nothing less than a sea change for the knowledge worker community. This is important as we see this as a major step along the road companies embark upon when building true Collaborative Business Environments.

Features include "Recent Contacts" and "Message Recall."  With Recent Contacts, users will get a one-click, dashboard view of recently sent emails and chats to quickly locate a key contact.  The Message Recall feature will let users quickly recall an email message after it has been sent by mistake, saving a user from a potential conflict or miscommunication situation.

Within Activities, knowledge workers can bring together various e-mail messages, instant messages, documents, and other items into one logical unit.  It uses (so-called) Web 2.0 technologies including Backpack, Atom, Tagging, REST, Ajax, and JSON.

Notes 8 also includes productivity editors that support the Open Document Format (ODF).  Knowledge workers can create word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents in ODF format.  The productivity editors also support Microsoft Office and Open Office file formats.

A few weeks ago, we began a look at what we’ve started to call Collaboration 3.0.  In an age of This 2.0 and That 2.0, where such terms become meaningless, it behooves us to look at technologies in the marketplace that have the potential to dramatically influence how we work and conduct business while also having a positive impact on the bottom line.

We coined Collaboration 3.0 in part to gently poke fun at the 2.0ers (when I started seeing references to Porn 2.0, I knew we had crossed a line) but the reality is that Collaboration 3.0 describes a very high level of collaboration, where multiple companies across the globe work together as if they were all part of one giant enterprise.  The tools that such collaboration requires are extraordinary as well.

Indeed, companies can even achieve extraordinary results through the use of fairly early Collaboration 3.0 technologies.  Our poster child for this is Boeing and its 787 Dreamliner aircraft program.  By bringing customers and partners into the process from day 1, and developing the platforms to support extensive interaction, Boeing cut 18 months out of the development and production cycle.

The use of Collaboration 3.0 also had a transformative effect on Boeing’s business.  In many respects, Boeing moved from being a traditional aircraft manufacturer to a model that more resembles a systems and design company cum supply-chain integrator.

Ironically, at the same time, competitor Airbus was struggling to use Collaboration 1.0 technologies - and not doing terribly well at that.  Different parts of Airbus working on the same project were using different and incompatible versions of design and PLM tools.  This resulted in significant delays in the Airbus A380 program and an expected ca. €4.8 billion loss.

The proof is in the bottom line.  The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the most successful launch of a new aircraft in history.  To date, 47 customers have ordered 677 airplanes worth ca. $110 billion based on current list prices.  The Dreamliner’s competitor, the Airbus A350 XWB, has struggled through three redesigns and industry criticism for not meeting fuel economy and passenger comfort goals.  It has garnered only 154 firm orders.

This concludes our initial look at Collaboration 3.0 but we would like to hear from those of you who are starting to deploy Collaboration 3.0-like technologies.  E-mail me at collab30@basex.com.

Last week we began our look at Collaboration 3.0, a term we coined to describe a very high level of collaboration, where multiple companies across the globe work together as if they were all part of one giant enterprise.

Our story began with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft, which was designed and built using Collaboration 3.0 principles and technologies.  Parts for the aircraft were designed concurrently by partners located in 11 countries and then assembled virtually in a computer model maintained by Boeing.

What we now think of as advanced collaboration (i.e. Collaboration 2.0), where we meet in online workspaces or share documents, is nothing compared to designing a complex piece of machinery such as an aircraft where two or more parts that are being independently designed will eventually be attached to the same product.  Concurrent design entails far greater complexity than one might imagine; Under the leadership of Rick Mutter, Boeing’s 787 chief IT architect, Boeing and its partners had to completely restructure their design and manufacturing processes.  Many had to replace existing software in order to use the same product lifecycle management software from Dassault Systémes, Catia.  But that was only part of the solution.Boeing deployed Citrix Presentation Server to enable the company’s designers and engineers to collaborate remotely with partners in virtual team workspaces.   

This was not an out-of-the-box deployment as Presentation Server is designed for text, not graphics.  Boeing and Citrix had to contend with low bandwidth and high latency issues to ensure a viable solution.

Other challenges related to data security.  No data was to be stored on local clients and users required secure access to the Boeing intranet for Unix workstations in addition to Windows machines.

Next week, as we continue this series, we’ll look at how Collaboration 3.0 impacted Boeing and the 787 Dreamliner program.

Web 2.0, Business 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Wherearewegoing 2.0… The list goes on and on.  But the designation 2.0 doesn’t really indicate a mature product.  If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from Microsoft, time and time again, is that it’s version 3.0 that counts.

Indeed, what we consider to be Web 2.0 and such is child’s play compared to the early Collaboration 3.0 processes and technologies that a few leading companies have been quietly deploying.Boeing is one such company.

Two weeks ago (the date was 7/8/7), Boeing unveiled the revolutionary 787 Dreamliner aircraft to a global audience, said to have reached 100 million viewers.   

Before the aircraft was even approved by Boeing’s board of directors, the company had created an online community, the World Design Team, literally comprised  of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, to solicit input on what they wanted to see in the new aircraft.  Boeing surveyed members of the community incessantly.  "Tell us what you want when you fly" was its philosophy.  The WDT’s input had real impact on the actual design of the aircraft.  But Boeing didn’t stop there.  

Boeing brought its suppliers in as partners during the initial design phases, with a goal of collaboratively designing the parts and then building them.  This was fairly ambitious and a project of far greater scale than had ever been done.  70% of the aircraft is not just being manufactured but also designed by Boeing’s partners in collaboration with Boeing around the world.

Parts for the aircraft were designed concurrently by partners located in 11 countries and then assembled virtually in a computer model maintained by Boeing.  What we now think of as advanced collaboration, where we meet in online workspaces or share documents, is nothing compared to designing a complex piece of machinery such as an aircraft where two or more parts that are being independently designed will eventually be attached to the same product.  Concurrent design entails far greater complexity than one might imagine.

Next week we’ll take a more in-depth look at how Boeing achieved this.