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.

I’ve been spending some time lately with social business and collaboration consultants, Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel, discussing where we’re headed with the Enterprise 2.0 industry and the role the Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays as a catalyst for this market. Oliver and Sameer spend their days helping companies - large companies - understand how best to leverage social and collaborative tools.  But what I find refreshing in our conversations is that they move very quickly to focus on what we’re trying to achieve with these technologies and strategies.  How are we utilizing Enterprise 2.0 to achieve demonstrable and measurable results?

As an industry we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the merits of social and web 2.0 tools in business.  That’s been an important part of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation as I firmly believe that the disparity between consumer technology and business technology has largely fueled the Enterprise 2.0 market.

At our Boston conference I heard time and time again, “it’s not about the tools, it’s about adoption.”  The burning question was how to change the business culture to better utilize these tools. There’s no question that culture and adoption play a massive role in being successful with Enterprise 2.0 but there’s more to this.

What many Enterprise 2.0 experts and practitioners fail to recognize are the end results they are trying to achieve.   Yes, replacing the corporate intranet with a wiki is generally a major step forward for businesses. But the promise of Enterprise 2.0 goes far beyond that, into functional areas within the organization that can also benefit from the underlying framework, strategies and tools that comprise Enterprise 2.0.  That’s where the real value lies and that’s also the trickiest part to fully understand, dissect and integrate with an enterprise-wide strategy.

With Oliver and Sameer’s help and guidance, our San Francisco conference is going to tackle this challenge through a series of sessions and half-day intensive workshop that Oliver and Sameer will co-chair. The workshop will address how to build a business case for enterprise-scale performance acceleration - a must attend program for anyone tasked with driving a company-wide Enterprise 2.0 strategy.  The breakout sessions will look at how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy can unlock value in specific functions within business including; business partner networks; customer support and collaboration networks.

Oliver and Sameer are putting tremendous effort into this program to provide attendees with actionable information and best practices. We hope to build on this program at future events so please let us know how this resonates with your interests or suggest topics you’d like them to address:

@olivermarks

@sameerpatel

@swylie650

Further discussion on this topic from Oliver and Sameer:

Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships - Pretzel Logic

How To Sell Collaborative Business Performance Internally - ZDNet

Today was an interesting day in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber that reminded me of my favorite short poem by Robert Frost,

“We all dance around the circle and suppose. The secret sits in the middle and knows.”

A spirited debate erupted this morning in the blogosphere and on Twitter whether the Enterprise 2.0 meme should be retired in favor of the newly popular Social Business meme. The best quote I heard all day was from Megan Murray at Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that won this year’s Open Enterprise 2009 case study . Ms. Murray wrote,

“In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

The secret, in this case, is that there are millions of enterprise professionals around the world that simply are not tuned into this hair-splitting debate. Whether we’d like to admit it to ourselves or not, large organizations are predominantly still hierarchical fiefdoms. Worse? Senior management and executives still make the big, expensive decisions on strategy and execution. We can continue to debate all the nuances of what Enterprise 2.0 is or isn’t or if it should be at all, but in the end, the good news about enterprise-wide collaboration and “social” innovation will be told and sold in small, leather-chaired conference rooms around the world. And, my prediction is that it will be told and sold by top drawer management consultants like Tammy Erickson.

Tammy is both a McKinsey Award-winning author and executive speaker. As President of nGenera Insight, she has conducted ground-breaking, extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles and the books Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. Her blog, Across the Ages, was one of the first Harvard Business Publishing Discussion Forum blogs. You can also find her blogging at Huffington Post.

I was the board member who nominated Tammy to open the conference this year in San Francisco. My position for supporting Tammy was rooted in the need to elevate the conversation of enterprise transformation to a senior management/executive level. Although we had many other good candidates, I felt Tammy was unique in her ability to raise the conversation to a more strategic level and connect the dots to business value. I hope you welcome her to our community.

And, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that Tammy is, well, female. Our old friend Tom Davenport, who originally pooh-poohed the Enterprise 2.0 meme, gives Tammy a ringing endorsement. I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy speak to executive audiences; she rocks the house. I hope our tight-knit e20 community will be as delighted. I’ve already cautioned her not to call “it” by name.

It’s difficult to miss Dries Buytaert in a crowd.

Standing at least 6′ 3″ tall, his spiky head of blond hair is easily recognizable. Known in the open source world as the founder of Drupal, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and instrumental player in Drupalcon, it’s obvious that Dries is a very clever and busy guy.  I caught up with Dries at the recent OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about how he manages to be so successful.

1) You are the founder of the Drupal content management system and CTO/Co-founder of Acquia. How did a Belgian like yourself get involved in CMS?

I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and Server-Side Includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.

After I relaunched my internal message to the public internet as drop.org in 2000, I continued to build on it for a year or so and added a lot of features. More than anything, it was an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds, blogging and content and user rating.

As my experiments evolved, they drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start their own experimenting and applying their own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to open source, and also how the community started.

So it was mostly by accident, and it quickly got out of hand.

2) Why did you feel the need to form Acquia and what does Acquia contribute to the Drupal community?

Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of Drupal, and by offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.

As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.

3) There were over 1,400 at Drupalcon in Washington DC, 2009. What is driving this community’s significant growth year over year?

A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including more than 4,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength.

4) There are a lot of open source projects out there today. What makes Drupal unique?

Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development.  But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.

This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do.

Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users.  If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster.  This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.

My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer.  Eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming.  In other words, one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.

5) Can you name some of the biggest sites that run on the Drupal platform?

A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more.  I believe there are two primary reasons people have chosen Drupal.  The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project.  Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.

6) What are the most common barriers to open source software adoption in the enterprise?

The biggest barrier is education - people are afraid of things that are unfamiliar.  The good news is that “open source” as a category of technologies is pretty mature in the enterprise - particularly in the data center.  Technologies like Linux, Apache, Eclipse and others are now standard tools in any data center infrastructure.  The next step in this evolution is for business buyers, outside the data center, to adopt solutions built on open source applications, like Drupal.

7) How do you overcome these objections?

This is where Acquia comes in – Acquia gives organizations the confidence they need to adopt Drupal based solutions.  They can access the same level of customer service support and guidance that they have come to expect from proprietary software products – in many cases, better customer service – while taking advantage of the innovation and value of open source Drupal.

8) What’s next for Drupal? Can you share any future plans with us?

We are currently working on Drupal 7.  We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding lots of new features in core (e.g. a new database backend, better file and image handling, improved access control, theme system improvements) but also improving usability and scalability.

Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search.  For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal’s database and doesn’t surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can’t pick it up as a product, and they’d fail to include it in their world-wide product database.

Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.

9) Is it true that the genesis of the name Drupal was actually a typo? What’s the story there?

Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.

Thanks again for your time Dries!

Mobile workers are getting left out in the cold as battles between vendors continues. I mentioned a few weeks ago the dispute between Google Voice and Apple over allowing Google Voice into Apple’s iPhone store. This week comes news that Microsoft is delivering enhancements to its Office Communicator Mobile, which only runs on Windows Mobile and Nokia Symbian devices. Microsoft also announced new partnership with Nokia. Great, but according to our research, the vast majority of business smartphones are, and will continue to be BlackBerry’s, while 38% of companies are adding support for iPhone over the next year. Enterprise mobile planners are increasingly getting stuck in the middle of efforts by mobile providers to own the operating system, the device, and the software. A trend that appears to be accelerating at the expense of innovation.

Yesterday, I did something that suggested to me that we are at an important tipping point in the psychology of Web 2.0 adoption. Within an hour of hearing the news of Facebook acquiring Friendfeed, I signed up for the latter, using my Facebook login info. I’d known for a year that Friendfeed is a great dashboard service that integrates your social media presence, but I had not joined. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Friendfeed was at one point described by TechCrunch (I think) as ‘a great service nobody will ever use.’  So how do you interpret actions like mine?

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This week brings news that Apple rejected Google’s application to make its Google Voice mobile application available for download via the iPhone application store. Google Voice users are instead stuck using Google’s web portal to manage their voicemail accounts.

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Starting in August, I’ll be taking a look at a variety of Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms.  If you’d like to see your product reviewed here on the Enterprise 2.0 blog, please send a note to itsinsider at gmail dot com.  Admittedly, I’m not a tech blogger, but I will be looking for the value add products bring to the broader concerns related to introducing these products to the enterprise (ease of use, cost, integration with legacy/large enterprise applications, security, governance, and so on).

Please be prepared to address the following:

1. Company background (who are the founders/# of employees/how did it the company get started/financing?)

2. Early successes (what is unique about the product/what value is it delivering to customers?)

3. At least one customer case study.

4. Who is the ideal customer for the product?

We’ve also opened up Demo Thursdays at the 2.0 Adoption Council.  We will reserve Thursday mornings at 9am ET for any vendor with a suitable enterprise-ready 2.0 offering.  You can sign up to be considered here.

The Enterprise 2.0 team is gearing up to build the the program for the first annual San Francisco conference coming this November and we’d like to hear your success stories, case studies and the valuable lessons you’ve learned working with E2 tools and technologies in your organization. Submit your proposal through the Call for Papers, open until July 31. We’re looking for sessions and workshop proposals in the following topics:

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Meet with leading vendors and notable start-ups in the Expo Pavilion, and learn about the latest tools and technologies through a series of free sessions open to all attendees.

Tuesday and Wednesday (11:35am - 5:55pm)