IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.

We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.

Tags: cloud, Collaboration, Google, IBM Lotus

“Video” was king at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as Skype and Cisco brought out new products designed to make it easier for folks to participate in high-quality video conferences from the comfort of their living room. But does video conferencing, which requires full attention, fit with the trends we’re seeing in social applications toward continuous partial communications using a variety of channels, with a variety of participants engaging in multiple simultaneous conversations? Joel Stein at TIME has an interesting take, arguing that people would rather TiVo their lives and shift between various channels and conversations than commit to a video conference. Yes, video conferencing is becoming indispensable in business communications, but will it become an integral part of social communications?

Tags: video

Register today and join us on February 2 to receive a comprehensive view of the strategies, applications and best practices you need to sustain a competitive advantage in today’s evolving marketplace.

What’s the best part? It is absolutely free of charge.

Keynotes and sessions at Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference will include:

• Morten T. Hansen, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, School of Information
• Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise 2.0 (Sameer Patel, The Sovos Group & Oliver Marks, The Sovos Group)
• Social Software Tools: A Critical Evaluation (Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch)
• Case Study: Hello Again: The Evolution of Hello.bah.com (Walton Smith, Senior Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton & Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton)

and more, including a Keynote from IBM.

Sponsorship Opportunities Available
By participating in Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference your company will see increased engagement with an active and influential Enterprise 2.0 community focused on using the latest communication and collaboration products and solutions.

Participating companies will:

• Generate qualified sales leads
• Increase thought leadership and brand awareness
• Showcase solutions
• Engage with business technology decision makers

For more information contact Amy Jones at 415.947.6173

Okay, I am going to milk my 15 minutes of fame as an E 2.0 “influential” to pitch you some pure vaporware. When I am not starting flame wars around E 2.0 culture change, I manage a research team within the Xerox Innovation Group, that is building a technology called Xerox Trails. The technology allows you to blaze and follow “trails” through Web content. Right now, the consumer incarnation of the technology, a product called “Trailmeme,” is in limited invitation-only beta. Read on for an invite code. What I’d like from you E 2.0 evangelists and champions is help brainstorming and dreaming up the ideal enterprise version of this technology, which is on our roadmap for a year or so down the line. At a higher level, I am interested in discussing a more conceptual question: how do you make sense of the huge mess of documents on a typical Intranet, hosted on multiple internal sites and technologies? This is the problem of enterprise document integration (EDI).

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Thank you to all who submitted proposals and have participated in the Call for Papers process thus far. We received 466 submissions, our highest number yet! The level of collaboration and communication happening within the E2 Community on the Call for Papers site has also been very impressive. Comment threads and discussions around submissions were common, and several participants have let us know about meaningful connections they’ve made with fellow participants. We’re thrilled that our partnership with Spigit, Inc. to provide the E2 Community with a more collaborative submission and voting experience has been well received.

Now comes the next stage: the Community Vote! Your feedback will be a primary factor in selecting sessions for Boston 2010.

We encourage all who submitted, all who plan on attending Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and vote for their favorites. Submissions are searchable by category, speaker or keyword, and votes received by each session will be viewable by all participants. Sessions advance to the final “Selected” stage based on community votes and final approval by our Advisory Board, and will be announced upon completion of the vote.

We look forward to discovering the topics and sessions you want to see incorporated in the E2 Boston 2010 Conference Agenda. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at mfarrell@techweb.com or (415) 947-6250.

The Call for Papers for Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston 2010 closes Friday, December 18. This is your last chance to submit a proposal for the opportunity to present in front of the largest gathering of business leaders and IT professionals employing Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

This year, we’ve partnered with Spigit, Inc. to provide the community with a new collaborative submission and voting experience. Your feedback will be a primary factor for selecting sessions for Boston 2010.

We’re looking for proposals for sessions in the following topics:

• 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

Submissions can be tagged with one of the pre-populated technology areas or a unique topic of the submitter’s choice. All submissions will be immediately viewable on a discussion forum, allowing for full transparency. We encourage the entire Enterprise 2.0 community - submitters, attendees and enthusiasts - to review the full lineup of submissions and provide feedback.

After the Call for Papers closes, an official voting period will run on the Spigit site from January 6 through January 20. Be sure to participate in the public vote as submissions with the most votes will become conference sessions at the Boston conference. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Manuela Farrell, Conference Manager, at (415) 947-6250.

We look forward to hearing your success stories, case studies and lessons learned and the community conversation they generate!

Bill Pray blogged today on the Supreme Court’s decision to take on a case involving the privacy rights of an employee’s use of a government-provided mobile device for personal text messaging. This case further highlights the growing concerns around privacy and compliance as companies embrace emerging communications applications. In almost every conversation I’ve had with end-user organizations the topic of compliance is front and center as they evaluate tools such as SMS, Instant Messaging, Microblogging, and social computing platforms. Our recent SRO session at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston explored many of these issues as well. Bottom line is that its wise to involve your governance and compliance officers early on in as you develop your enterprise 2.0 strategy.

Tags: Compliance, enterprise 2.0

The idea of Enterprise 2.0 is now a couple of years old, well into the trough of disillusionment as far as hype cycle position goes, and broad outlines are starting to become clear. So it is not surprising that two books have appeared in the last year that treat the subject broadly, systematically, and without the Kool-Aid that characterized books like Wikinomics, which appeared much earlier in the hype cycle. The first is one by the most usual of suspects, Andrew McAfee, titled, like his original article that coined the term, Enterprise 2.0 (the subtitle though, has changed appropriately, from “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” to “New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.”)  The second is “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” by Matt Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.  The two books are ideal foils to each other. They tackle the left and right brains of the Enterprise 2.0 idea respectively. To a certain extent, they are also evil twins to each other. Which one is better for you?

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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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Tags: Cisco, IBM Lotus, Microsoft

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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Tags: Cisco, Collaboration, Google, IBM Lotus, Microsoft, XMPP