Today we take the wraps off of our conference agenda for Enterprise 2.0 Boston. Our program will be a bit larger this year but more importantly, it has been organized differently, and now has track chairs for each of the major conference themes. By doing this we hope to create a more complete and cohesive set of sessions within each track on important trends, challenges and opportunities. This agenda also reflects an Enterprise 2.0 life-cycle approach, from strategy setting and vendor selection to application deployment, adoption and performance analysis. Below are my thoughts on the tracks we’re announcing today but we’re not done yet! Over the coming weeks expect some additions to our Keynote program, the start of our Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program and some evening fun we have in the works as well.

Strategy: From a “track” view on the agenda we plan to set the tone for the week with a newly created “Set Your Enterprise 2.0 Strategy” series of sessions. This track tackles the “why” of Enterprise 2.0 with an underlying theme of how to use Enterprise 2.0 to bring specific value to business, how to execute on a strategy and how to measure the results. The track explores the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 with different functional areas in business, from sales to supply chain to HR and product development. As an industry we have made tremendous progress in introducing social and collaborative strategies into business. The good news is that businesses are taking notice and making initial investments in people and technology. The better news is that this is just the beginning. Now that social and collaborative initiatives are showing up on the corporate agenda, the next opportunity lies in applying them to the traditional applications and processes that form the backbone of business. There’s a tremendous amount of ground yet to cover in Enterprise 2.0.

Tools: With clear objectives established we can explore the options for “Social Business Applications and Platforms”. As our industry has matured, so too have the tools and platforms that drive it. Enterprise 2.0 is rife with vendors and applications to pick from - from startups to major vendors, point solutions to software suites and full-blown platforms. Navigating this ever-changing landscape of innovation, software features, partners and platform ecosystems is no simple task. This track is invaluable in helping you avoid missteps and future-proof your technology investments. Within the social applications and platforms theme, we’re also calling out two related tracks on search and video. Search is often overlooked in Enterprise 2.0 but is ever more important as the volume of information explodes. Search in the context of Enterprise 2.0 is extremely powerful and is an area we wanted to dig into a little deeper this year. Be sure to check out our track on how to “Use Search to Tame Complexity and Discover Opportunity.” And there’s no question that video continues to grow in importance in business as it already has in the consumer world. Our track on “Emerging Video Applications and Enterprise Collaboration” looks at the latest trends from “YouTube” style video usage to high-end telepresence systems.

External Community: Now more than ever businesses are looking outside their organizational boundaries for a competitive edge. The track on how to “Integrate Social Media and Community Approaches” into an Enterprise 2.0 framework addresses this head-on. While most social media discussions tend to revolve solely around marketing and PR, we believe the value of social media goes well beyond these functional areas into other parts of the business such as customer service, sales and product development. Extending social media for marketing, PR and beyond is a key theme this track explores.

Application Delivery & Integration: With a well thought out strategy and a complete understanding of the available tools, we shift to a track we’re calling “Delivery Strategies: Deploy, Connect and Mobilize.” This track weighs today’s application deployment options such as the cloud and SaaS against traditional, on premise hosting. There’s no question that the software world is going through a radical transformation as enterprises gain acceptance of infrastructure, platforms, software –and everything else as-a-service. Understanding these changes in the context of deploying social and collaborative applications is vital. With new choices comes increased complexity and more heterogeneous application environments. Connecting these applications requires new skills and an understanding of development environments, APIs and the integration glue required to make it all work together seamlessly. And with the volume of Smartphone devices being used by the workforce, businesses must also understand how vendor choices and deployment options affect the availability of applications to a mobile workforce. This track explores important developments in mobile but from a deployment standpoint, assessing the options across native mobile enterprise applications, mobile middle-ware, web-based and widget-based access to applications.  The development of this track is in direct response to attendee requests for more technical sessions.

Adoption: There is no better way to learn than to hear from practitioners. These are the pioneers of Enterprise 2.0, forging a path that can often lead to unforeseen challenges and frustration but also to great lessons learned and hopefully success. The “Adoption in the Enterprise for Practitioners” track is chock full of case studies and best practices on all aspects of Enterprise 2.0 with the goal of driving executive and user support and deeper integration into the fabric of the business culture.

Workshops: The tracks are each complimented by related workshops.  We have some fantastic new workshops this year as well as a couple of the most popular courses from our last conference. These are deep dive sessions and generally more instructional in nature.

Call for Papers: Lastly, a big congratulations to the people selected to present from our call for papers.  We have announced the following sessions and have a couple more awaiting approval.  We also have a number of panel discussions in the works and will be sure to consider the people who submitted through the call for papers for those sessions.

Extending MITRE’s Reach: Business Networking for and Beyond the Enterprise- Donna Cuomo, Chief Information Architect, The MITRE Corporation and Laura Damianos, Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the Enterprise and on the Web- Thierry Hubert, President, Darwin Ecosystem and Bill Ives, VP of Social Media, Darwin Ecosystem

Joining E20 Apps Together for Better Integration, Productivity and Measurement - Lee Bryant, Director, Headshift

Enterprise 2.0: It’s no Field of Dreams (CSC Case Study)- Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration, CSC, and Simon Scullion, Service Development Manager, CSC

Enterprise 2.0 Lock Down in a Highly Regulated Environment - Abha Kumar, Principal, Information Technology, Vanguard and Andrew Lazzaro, Manager, Information Technology, Vanguard

The Dark Side of Enterprise 2.0 - Redux - Greg Lowe, Social Media, Alcatel-Lucent and Kathleen Culver, Transformation Architect, Alcatel-Lucent

Innovation Through E2.0: Three Case Studies that Make the Business Case - Mark Fidelman, EVP, MindTouch

Social Learning 2.0 - Marcia Conner, Senior Enterprise Strategist, Pistachio Consulting

We’ll have many more updates in the coming weeks.  I look forward to seeing you all in Boston!

Cubetree launched a free collaboration suite designed to bring the capabilities of Facebook to the enterprise. But Cubetree’s offering goes a bit further that social computing by integrating more traditional collaboraton capabilities such as file sharing, as well as Web 2.0 services such as blogs and wikis into a complete SaaS-based collaboration offering. There’s a trend here, underscored by commercial products such as Telligent Community Server and IBM Lotus Connections to bring Facebook-like capabilities to the enterprise market, but where is Facebook itself in all of this?

I had a chance to speak with Niall Kennedy, who has written quite a bit about cloud computing recently, making sense of the jargon and clarifying the issues. For example, see his The Anatomy Of Cloud Computing, and Measuring Efficiency In The Cloud posts.

I am particularly obliiged to Niall for his observation that companies thinking about moving to the cloud should pick solutions that best match their non-cloud stacks, in order to minimize costs and breakage.

One of the clear trends thus far in the IT industry is that many displaced workers are looking at contract work as a means to survive in these turbulent economic times. Fortunately, Web 2.0 and hosted applications such as Google Apps, Skype, Zoho, Gizmo, ThinkFree, Yugma, and FreeConferenceCall.com enable individuals to access a full suite of communication and collaboration applications that previously would have required a significant up-front and on-going investment. So how do these types of applications jump the gap from “useful for small groups or individuals” to “useful for large enterprise.”

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Microsoft’s announcement that it is migrating FolderShare to Windows Live Sync in December has touched off a great deal of confusion over Microsoft’s application strategy for cross-system and cross-platform synchronization. FolderShare has been in beta since Microsoft acquired it in 2005. It is designed to allow individuals to maintain shared folders across systems, or share folders on their computers with others, both Mac and Windows clients are supported. The migration to Live Sync provides feature and branding improvements, but maintains the same basic functionality. Live Mesh on the other hand is similar to Apple’s “MobileMe” to enable synchronization of things like bookmarks, mail, and contacts across multiple devices. At some point I’d expect them to harmonize features and brandings, but for now think of “Sync” as a file synchronization service.

Now that Microsoft has officially launched SaaS versions of Exchange and Office, they’ve begun making plans to deliver the next version of Office via SaaS as well. Microsoft’s move into the SaaS space is in some ways reactionary, as they look to fend off challenges from Zoho and Google, but it is also going to create concerns for the hundreds of companies that offer their own suites of hosted Microsoft apps.

As a recent convert to OpenOffice I’m still not sure the SaaS market for office apps is going to replace thick versions of document, presentation, and spreadsheet applications, but I do look forward to the continued ability of SaaS-based office productivity suites to enable easier document collaboration.

At the 6th annual Dreamforce conference this week in San Francisco, attendees were treated to an impressive keynote demonstration of their Winter ‘09 CRM. The 27th release in less than 10 years does not disappoint, but there was one new feature that really shone. The newly added Salesforce to Salesforce functionality specifically focuses on the importance of building partner relationships and leveraging partners to close deals faster.

The new Salesforce to Salesforce addition to their service permits two Salesforce.com using partner companies to share leads, opportunities and valuable information within their Salesforce.com databases.

George Hu, Salesforce.com’s EVP of Applications and Marketing, illustrated the value of Salesforce to Salesforce by touching on the partnership between Delta and Air France. Because the two airlines share customers, it made sense to pool their sales data. Salesforce to Salesforce provides a perfect and seamless way to achieve this common goal.

For more info on the Winter ‘09 release, take a peek here .

I generally view a trend as nearing maturing when the Economist sits up and takes a notice. They now have a special on cloud computing:

As IT gets cloudier, the economics of the business will change

As you might expect from the Economist, they take a moderate view:

In essence, what [Cloud computing] does is take the idea of distributed computing a step farther. Still, it will add a couple of layers to the IT stack. One is made up of the cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The other is software that helps firms to turn their IT infrastructure into their own cloud, known as a “virtual operating system for data centres”.

The article is fairly well-rounded and covers expected impact on SaaS players, hardware providers and industry structure. Besides the Economist story, EC2 coming off beta and offering an SLA for its Linux cloud model, and also offering a Windows version, are signs of true critical mass.

All the more reason to vote for cloudworker as the new telecommuter! Incidentally, my neologism made the NY Times yesterday, and also featured in a piece in industry trade site SearchUnified Communications.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last week over Google’s entry into the browser wars. The real impact of Chrome is that Google rather than trying to simply displace IE, Firefox and Safari, Google wants to own the interface for Web 2.0.

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The Office 2.0 Conference is a fun event to attend with many interesting web-based apps to explore. Ismael Ghalimi is a very passionate conference host, who boasts 100% use of web/SaaS-based applications to run the event. Ismael has also taken a firm stand on the use of paper and signage at his conference with nary a pulp-based product in sight. I got quite a few demos while attending the conference today, but a few of them stood out for me.

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