If you are a new startup that requires several people to work together, just how cheaply can you set up your IT network?  Very cheaply it turns out.

You will need computers – but just about any old computer will do.  You can use the cast offs from other companies that are upgrading – they often pay to have them removed.  The software on the machines is not important as long as they have a browser and a functioning Internet connection.  Don’t go buy the latest machines loaded with expensive software.  If you have to purchase computers, try to purchase used ones.  If you really want a new one, get the cheapest model with the least software.  Don`t get a laptop until you really need it.

Next you will need Internet access.  Start-out with a dial-up connection – it may work with the other suggestions I’ll make below and it is cheaper than highspeed DSL.  If you have wifi, find a free drop and work from there.  (Note that two café lattés from Starbucks cost as much as a month of cut-rate DSL.)

If the other employees are also working at the same location, you will need a router to share the internet and some cables.

Don`t buy a server!  You won`t need it.

For the software, use the web.  There are fantastic services out there that can support a new company with collaborative tools and software that is free to use or extremely cheap.  They are either web based (web2.0) or hosted desktops.  Here is my short list of hosted desktops:

• Ghost (G.ho.st)- provides a web desktop via a browser with 5 gb storage and 3 gb of mail.  It is a fully hosted solution aimed at personal users.  It just released a version accessible from mobile devices.  It includes a full suite of applications as well as Zoho and Google apps (see below).  Very cool stuff and probably good enough for starting up.
• Ulteo- a open-source free personal desktop that can be shared with others. It is Linux based and comes pre-loaded with applications such as the Open Office suite.  Desktop sharing is useful for collaboration and as a web conferencing application.  The number of invites is limited and fees apply as more are added.  There is no corporate shared storage.  The desktop is hosted by Ulteo or can be downloaded and run locally.  File synchronization is supported between local and server storage.
• (TBD) - there are other services coming.  Stay tuned for more.

For web 2.0 solutions, check out the following list:

• Central Desktop- a web2.0 collection of team collaboration tools.  While there is a free version, the memory available is limited to 25 MB – not alot.  Fees increase with the number of users, projects and storage.
• Google- Google provides Google Docs and the more complete Google Apps which provides business e-mail, collaboration tools and on-line storage.  Very popular. Has a 30 day free trial and then its $50 per user per year.  If you can put up with advertisements, there is a free standard edition that is supported by ads.
• Jooce- an online system for nomadic computer users.  Limited in scope and aimed at social networking from any Internet terminal.  However, it is free and there are (currently) no storage limits.
• QTask – an web based project coordination tool.  First 5 users are free for the first year, then it is $50/user/month.
• ThinkFree – a Korean company that provides on-line office software.  There is a free office suite and a workspace edition (in beta) for corporate use.  The applications are high quality  and look very similar to Microsoft Office.  Mobile devices are supported.  While they support on-line access, their main target is self-hosted solutions.
• Zoho- a suite of web2.0 applications that provide most of what a small business needs.  There are a wide number of generic applications that can support small businesses.  Zoho is very similar to Google Apps but has a broader selection of applications.  Collaborative document editing is possible making it an excellent choice for a micro business.
• Zooos – A web 2.0 office application suite.  Looks to be still in development but the blog and other parts of the site appear inactive.

Other interesting solutions that require a server:

• EyeOS - EyeOS provides an open-source server solution that allows your company data to be accessible from everywhere.  However, they do not host the server – you have to do that.

If these solutions don’t solve your problems then you may have to purchase a server and set up a LAN.  Just beware of the costs and complexity involved.  The above solutions can be up and running in minutes.  A LAN will take days and cost you many hundreds if not thousands of dollars.  Then add the software.  By the time you get file servers, security and enterprise e-mail with MS Exchange Server installed, you can easily spend $30,000.

If you know of other web 2.0 or hosted business solutions out there, I’d like to hear from you.

Se pare ca GoogleDocs este in topul preferintelor utilizatorilor de astfel de aplicatii, desi cei de la Zoho sau Microsoft sunt competitori seriosi, asa cum se poate observa si in link-urile propuse. Pentru a atrage cat mai multi adepti si a raspunde nevoilor utilizatorilor obisnuiti cu procesorul de texte offline de la Microsoft, GoogleDocs continua sa aduca functii noi, precum:

• inserarea dictionarului Merrriam-Webster si a Enciclopediei Britannica, astfel incat se poate cauta orice definire sau sinonim al unui termen. Din pacate, aceste facilitati (ce se pot consulta si aici) nu se adreseaza decat cunoscatorilor limbii engleze…
• cautarea de imagini, asa cum se poate observa si aici;
• generarea de cuprinsuri, a se vedea detalii aici;

Multe dintre aceste facilitati Zoho deja le contine, insa dupa parerea mea, competitia dintre producatori este benefica pentru noi, utilzatorii de rand, pentru ca mai e loc de inca astfel de functionalitati, asa cum puteti citi si aici.

In finalul acestei insemnari, ce va continua pe masura ce noi functionalitati vor aparea, va propun cateva lectii invatate din proprie experienta de Dennis McDonald. Poate va vor fi de folos.

This is cross-posted with ReadWriteWeb where I will be occasionally writing on the Enterprise Channel.

I recently attended the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The highlight for me was the first session where Ismael Ghalimi interviewed David Allen, the author of “Getting Things Done.” The book and associated methodology highlight the need to capture and organize ideas and tasks in a structured way. The interesting question for me is how to make it work on an Enterprise or company level.

One theory of Getting Things Done (GTD) is that it is impossible to “really” concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Therefore, a system like GTD helps juggle the competing tasks to organize and prioritize them. As you can imagine, the bulk of the conversation centered on Office 2.0 type tools that can help facilitate this process. David is an avid user of Jott for example. He uses it to capture his thoughts while driving so he doesn’t force his brain to keep a running list. What struck me after listening to him in the keynote and subsequent panel is that the tools are actually the least important part of successfully getting things done. Practitioners of GTD in the Enteprise world probably use an infinite number of tool combinations including Outlook Tasks, Jott, iPhones, Text notes, Lotus Notes, etc.; you get the idea. What is fundamentally more important is the discipline and commitment to do it.

We all have different levels of both and our respective individual success will vary. What I find interesting is to figure out how to make a group practice GTD consistently. There is no silver bullet but the following factors need to be addressed:

• Management commitment - There is no way that an entire group will practice GTD if the management team is not fully committed and emphasizes it every day. Managers (and team members) need to conduct meetings with GTD principles and plan work in the same way
• Training - GTD is a clever methodology that leverages alot of common sense. However, if a group is going to adopt it and use it in the course of business, they need training. For no other reason, the need to speak the same language with each other is critical. For example, if I tell you I’m going to put that task in my One Week Action List, you better know what I mean
• Incentives – People must have incentives to adopt this system in a consistent and lasting way. GTD could be baked into employee’s MBOs, team goals, public recognition opportunities, whatever. There has to be incentives and measurement for true adoption
• Tools - As I mentioned earlier, the actual tools can vary widly. In the panel discussion I attended, there were several vendors (Enleiten, Mindjet, bllist) who utilize GTD concepts in their products and/or methodologies. There is even a GTD plug-in for FireFox. Whatever tool a company decides to use, they must use it consistently and ensure it fits into how people work. Otherwise, I guarantee it will fail

Does your company practice GTD? How does it work?

The first event started as a bit of fun and evolved into a deep conversation. The second was thought provoking – I had an aha moment. The third evoked a reaction, and I typed the first draft of this post. The fourth spurred me on until I pressed “Send to Weblog”… As each event happened, I kept thinking what’s in it for me? This question keeps coming at me from my friends at Financial Services firms as they look at Enterprise 2.0 tools and technologies and Social Media. They wonder if there is an ROI from weak ties (borrowing the term from “The Strength of Weak Ties” – the personal interconnectivity that is formed loosely in LinkedIn and Facebook are often “weak ties”, as you may not know the person particularly well). They wonder if all of this personal interconnectivity is helpful or harmful. While they can see the value for some of this in their personal lives, they wonder about it professionally. Is this a waste of time? What will their managers think of their use of these tools? Are they exposing themselves too much? Can FS firms allow these technologies? Can they stop them? Has the iPhone changed everything?

Event 1… I have immersed myself in e2.0, the tools, the thinking, etc… I’ve jumped in feet first, to the point that a friend of mine (a younger single friend of mine…) put on my Facebook wall on Monday that I am “more wired than the 20 somethings [he] typically date[s]..”. Okay, my pithy reply to his wall post could have been the end of it, but we started an e-mail exchange… Here’s some of what he sent me:

you’ve got plaxo, linked in, facebook, twitter, aim, and so on.. more than me.. and you’re using them more than the college kids I know.. seems a bit over the top perhaps.. I’m actually dropping nearly everything in favor of facebook.. and that’s only for real people i’ve met/know to see.. and while i might check it somewhat regularly, i’m personally lowering my networkedness.. it’s all too much.. too many things to manage, too many e-mail addresses to check, too many notifications of change.. gmail, my facebook, and my cell number.. that’s it for me now.. i’m not the only one feeling this way.. even seeing some retaliation from 25 year olds, who pretty much grew up in a post AIM world.. just saying.. and don’t forget… every time you change something in one of your networks, a message goes out to others telling them as such.. it’s fun at first, but after a while people might think you’re spending all your time on twitter and not enough on things that actually matter..

In my reply, I talked about the value of experimentation with these tools in order to understand the utility of them. However, it did get me thinking that I might be broadcasting too much information about what I am doing, and broadcasting it too widely.

Event 2… Tuesday, I was talking with a buddy of mine as we commuted into NY after a nice game of squash. He is a trader on a desk at a major Wall Street firm. He was asking me how with all of the regulations around electronic communications could firms allow iPhones on trading desks. People now have a good web browser, their personal e-mail, and the ability to IM friends in their hand – none of which run through the corporate compliance server or corporate firewall. I can imagine the headache this causes firms. As part of the settlement between the SEC, NY Attorney General, NASD, NASSA, NYSE, and State Regulators with Wall Street firms, firms are required to abide by the following:

The insulation of research analysts from investment banking pressure. Firms will be required to sever the links between research and investment banking, including analyst compensation for equity research, and the practice of analysts accompanying investment banking personnel on pitches and road shows. This will help ensure that stock recommendations are not tainted by efforts to obtain investment banking fees.

In practice this agreement and other like regulations require communications between various parties at investment banks to be monitored to ensure compliance with this agreement. The iPhone adds a serious challenge to the monitoring of the communications between various parts of the investment bank.

Event 3… Yesterday, a colleague of mine, Steve Douty, posted this post On Collaboration. He starts his message with this:

“Collaboration” is one of those vague, multivalent terms – like “Web 2.0” – that can mean many things, and also nothing at all. Because of this, it’s hard to get people to do it: “Why can’t you all just collaborate?!” It’s also hard to sell just on its own merits.

He proceeds to discuss the value of collaboration, and explores why Friendster has fizzled while Flickr and Wikipedia have flourished. He discusses 7 characteristics that make Flickr and Wikipedia different; these are: Vision, Purpose or outcome, Topicality, Running start, Continuous flow, Refresh, Logical end. While the discussion he started it excellent and thought provoking, I could not help thinking a lot of the adoption of platforms comes back to the utility of the platform in general, and what’s in it for me.

Event 4… The last night, another colleague of mine, Brian Magierski, posted this post on Social Media and the value of weak ties. Brian discusses the value of Weak Ties, and references the work of Andrew McAfee and Mark Granovetter (and like Brian, I’m not going to repeat it here). He then goes on to discuss his personal use of Facebook at Twitter:

I find that Facebook and Twitter in part do the job of keeping me aware in short snippets of downtime each day as to what my extended network of mostly ‘weak ties’ are doing (both small things and major life/career shifts). The job these SNS services are doing for me in part is to keep me connected and informed of the whereabouts and whatabouts of a substantially larger number people than I have ever been able to remain connected to in the past. These snippets get burned into my brain and my searchable SNS services for recall in an On Demand manner when required. Yes, it’s also entertaining.

I agree these two tools specifically are entertaining. As a social tool Facebook is great. As a work tool, I’m not convinced, but I see the potential. The mix between social and work people on my Facebook friends is a challenge or me – I don’t want my social friends and work friends to see the same info… This fact alone forces me to limit my use of Facebook artificially. I like having Twitter update my status there. I like the RSS feed out of it. Plaxo Pulse allows you to differentiate between professional, social, and family relationships. I think having that in Facebook would make Facebook more useful for me. Twitter has been a fantastic way for my co-workers and I to get stay in touch. My direct team is spread the northeast at our clients, and my extended team is spread around the US and Europe. Twitter is an easy and definitely entertaining way to stay in touch in 140 character so less…

Social networks, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, etc… are all tools. They are the hammer and wrenches of this electronic era. These tools help us in our personal lives and they help us in our professional lives. As with any tool, you want to choose a tool that helps you with accomplishing something. You can’t drive a nail with a Phillips head screwdriver. Once you have the tools, it all comes back to a simple question of “what’s in it for me?”. I have tried all of the social networks, e2.0 tools, web 2.0 tools, etc… If there is no utility in the tool for me, I drop it, and drop it fast – I don’t have the time to linger. Yes, a friend occasionally asks me to take a second look at something, but that is the rare event. More often then not, the tool isn’t useful enough for me so it follows the usage trajectory that Steve discussed in his post.

While it is true that I have tried more tools that I care to admit, but I only use a couple daily, and I have set my browser (currently Flock) to open each of the following each morning:

* Google Reader – for reading my RSS feeds,
* Facebook – for fun and reconnecting with old friends, and strengthening ties with new ones,
* LinkedIn – for business networking,
* Plaxo – for address book sync’ing (but not yet for Plaxo Pulse as I don’t feel utility there yet),
* Twitter – for fostering teamwork within my co-workers,
* WordPress – for my blogging,
* SocialText – for our wiki work,
* Ning – for our firm’s private social network (note: I tried to create a social network within my family and there was no interest, so we dropped it – fast), and
* Kalivo – for collaboration with co-workers and clients.

All of these are useful for one or more specific things for me. Yes, some of the utility comes from the collaboration and conversation. Some of it comes from the weak ties it helps maintain. However, in all cases there is a utility for me…

What does this have to do with Financial Services and IT? Frankly, everything! My friends at the FS firms are struggling with the question of “What’s in it for me?” as they look at these tools. The IT leadership is struggling with the ROI of some of these tools. They are driven by short-term budget realities, and don’t have the funding to invest in Weak Ties. I’ll argue that this is short sighted, but it is the reality of their lives. The Legal & Compliance departments are struggling how to control the activities on such ubiquitous and disparate platforms. Using LinkedIn is commonly thought to be a sign that you are leaving the firm. People are starting to use it for business networking given the richness of the data there. Facebook is blocked by some firms’ firewalls as being not work related. However, our friends at Apple and Research in Motion have put tools in our hands that are more powerful then the desktop machines we had a few years ago, and these tools can’t be controlled in the traditional ways. Their use is going to only increase. FS management needs to decide how to respond. Are they going to be a NGE?

Following our conversation, Vladimir Oane raises the question: Who actually uses all these shiny new web apps (rounded corners and all)? He only uses a handful, and these have been around for some time or tend to come from giants like Google.

His question reminded me of this earlier post where Dan Berte wrote about web apps that didn’t work for him. Indeed, of the half dozen new projects that show up on Museum of Modern Betas every day, how many do we really need? They might be built to be bought; but, if it is indeed “the same million people” using all of them, how many will this million of us use?

The mainstream media is shaking its head at the cash-happiness at the top of the Web 2.0 pyramid.
(See The Skype hyper in The Economist’s Oct 4th edition:

“By buying Skype, the internet phenomenon of 2005, eBay started a
bubble. Google, with its purchase of YouTube, the cyber-star of 2006,
inflated it further. And Microsoft and Google now appear tempted to add
more froth by investing a silly sum in Facebook, the latest big thing.
All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social
network—make almost no money. EBay’s disappointment with Skype is a
timely reminder of where this fad might lead.”)

As a first pass at an answer, I’ll tally my web app usage as well. Our position as
early, enthusiastic adopters in Eastern Europe is somewhat more
equidistant than adopters in the Valley. Without personally knowing too many of the
developers, we evaluate web apps quickly
and decide in the first few seconds whether we’ll use something or not.

What are the ones that I use?

1. del.icio.us – closing up on 1000 bookmarks. The problem? When I try to retrieve, as often as not I had actually just starred the post in Google Reader. Or done nothing at all to save the page. Google Web History usually kicks in as an emergency solution.
2. Flickr – essential to my peace of mind since my HDD died and took all of my photos with it
3. Google Video – mostly for the excellent content from the Googleplex
4. Google Notebook and Google Docs – for research support and collaborative document authoring with my team
5. Twitter – micro-social-networking
6. Stikkit - now used as a GTD inbox for anything web-related. I had high hopes for this app. It could have become my inbox to the internet – intelligently feeding my travels to Dopplr, my goals to 43things, etc. It now looks abandoned in favour of IWantSandy. (Guess what? I DON’T want Sandy. I want a more integrated Stikkit.)
7. LinkedIn – would use actively if I could set up customized RSS feeds for Questions on subjects I can authoritatively discuss
8. Facebook – mostly to keep in touch with the people I met at the Office 2.0 Conference
9. coComment - tracking comments posted on other blogs (though very dissapointed with its performance, I’m not aware of a better solution)
10. More recently, specific social networks such as Social Media Today
11. Tumblr – for a personal blog / journal
12. Mindmeister – almost any project I start these days begins as a mindmap. If I need to collaborate with anyone else, I’ll use Mindmeister to share mindmaps without forcing people to install software or to edit the map together in real time.
13. Dopplr – while I’m not yet enough of a frequent traveler to make this immensely useful, I’m quite enchanted with its simplicity and the most seamless integration I’ve ever seen.
14. iUseThis – voting for the Mac apps that we use. This has become my no. 1 destination when I need Mac software. Would love to see a similar proposition for web apps
15. Picnik – for my very occasional image editing needs, a simple and sweet solution.

I had great hope for these, but now only use very seldom:

• Last.fm – there’s just not enough of a support for classical music – let alone the contemporary classical that I listen most of the time.
• Plaxo 3.0 – I cancelled my Premium subscription to this very promising re-iteration of the rather spammy Plaxo. It’s supposed to be a solution to the Syncing problem. At the moment, it just doesn’t sync what I need.
• 43things – occasionally used to collect random goals.
• iGoogle – promising, but I’m quickly losing patience with how long it takes to load / switch tabs

A couple to which I never gave much of a chance:

• None of the social news sites. I need highly selective filters to counter information overload. I need to fight the “too much input, no output” syndrome. No way am I going to add lots more input.
• Pownce, Jaiku, Ziki
• MySpace – useless AND ugly.
• Joost – I have no use for watching pocker games.
• These are the ones I remember. The rest? Hmm….

I’ll follow up with a post on what’s missing in Web 2.0 apps.

Last week, I was invited to talk about Office 2.0 applications on the IT&C show at the Money Channel. Their archive seems to lag 1-2 months behind their live show, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see the show

I took advantage of this opportunity to add to my understanding of apps in the Office 2.0 area that are being developed and used in Romania. Here’s a round-up of the people I talked to and our discussions:

• Mircea Goia put together a vey well-researched round-up of Web 2.0 presence in Romania on Read/Write Web. The article was written mid-June, so it is still fairly up-to-date. This was my starting point. His focus was mostly on social networks, while I was more interested in enterprise collaboration. Two of his apps fit my profile: Metromind’s BluoCMS and Soft32’s ZuluWriter. I contacted both of them. I also wrote to Mircea, who was very responsive… but, unfortunately, in a different timezone on the other side of the globe! I couldn’t get his input before the show, but look forward to discussing in the future.
• Vladimir Oane of Metromind was a joy to talk to – a wealth of ideas. We wondered why Romanian customers prefer paying a large amount up-front in order to own the product rather than going with a subscription-based model (even when the software they pay for will be outdated long before their investment pays off!). He insisted that the limiting factor in usage of Office 2.0 in Romania is culture, not technology – a point with which I fully agree. East European education methods and work ethics have been strongly individualistic and competitive for a long time. Collaboration has always been present, but more in the form or familism or cronyism (for ex. “suflatul la ore”) than in the form of open cooperation. However, “we build our tools, then they shape us“, (to quote a favorite Stowe Boyd theme). Our culture has been determined by the tools we have been encouraged and allowed to use, as much as by the assignments we have been given and the results we have been measured against. How quickly can culture cange when you introduce new tools? It is very likely to depend on how assignments and evaluation change, as well.
• Lucian Todea of ITNT/Soft32 has one of the more interesting projects around: ZuluWriter, an online word processor and document manager. Gotta love their homepage! Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant at the moment. The functionality as hinted (not yet implemented) seems to be quite promising in the tagging and content sharing area.
• Zoltan Lorincz of Mindomo has the only fully-developed Office 2.0 application that I am aware of at the moment (in Romania, of course). He is based in Timisoara, and he openly told me he doesn’t expect Romanian client anytime soon. Mindomo is a (feature-rich) mindmapping application, and mindmapping itself is somewhat of a novelty to most Romanian corporate settings. A pity.

We’re getting a 3-minute demo of the following apps:

• Vitalist – created in Poland, looks nice; but I’m so happy with the way OmniFocus is coming along that I’m unlikely to be moving to an enterprise 2.0 tool myself.
• Smartsheet – this looks wonderfully cool, going way beyond what you can do with Excel. The permission structure is very granular – people can be able to only edit some portions. This looks to me one of the most promising apps here today.
• Nozbe – also looks nice, love the paper integration as well. The integrated timetracking is something that I’ve been trying to obtain for some time.
• PlanHQ – GTD for company planning. Looks great!
• Ismael shows how he uses Salesforce for GTDing contacts.

The discussion from this point on became very interesting to participate in, so I couldn’t blog anymore

Dan Farber just started a very lively panel discussion asking Gafni from SAP if they use Zimbra. Sam Lawrence has the approach that the most important is to make it very simple to work with people you work with and new people. Focus on making it very easy. Oliver Marks of Sony hosts a worldwide collaboration platform online for Sony PS developers – offering a lot of support. Paul Pedrazzi of Oracle says that the siloed apps was that way for a reason, but is shifting the approach towards an app lab. They launched a social network, putting the person at the center of everything – by giving others the ability to see the entire picture of a person. Simons of BEA touches a sensitive point: web 2.0 needs to plug more into what already exists, whereas fun is what we usually think about re 2.0.

Openness in enterprises? Sony is prepared to pay handsomely for the source code but won’t consider anything hosted. Companies are starting to look at the possibility of sharing, looking at what other companies are doing.

What are people doing to implement? SAP trying to understand what can be transparent in an organization and what cannot? Zimbra has a real estate agency client who has no way to share content quickly among each other, share presence data – but know they can have competitive advantage by making this underlying data available.

The notion of “people-centric”; the social web is however very challenging for companies. Farber asks what are the experiences of the participants. Pedrazzi decided to not ask for permission, but just build using the same login and using the HR data. Just sent an email to launch, propelling from 3 to 8000 people within one day. What triggers implementation – improving communication so that the friction goes down. Social networks allow people to focus.

The sales cycle of social computing adoption into the enterprise – you need to get an approver at the enterprise management level.

If customers are being exposed to the technologies – what are the vendors doing to satisfy that need?

Probably the greatest question: suites OR interoperability? People will do what they want anyway; the power is swinging to end users. If you design the applications right, users can integrate very easily. The consensus seems to be on mashable modules rather than suites.

What’s still missing? More and more content types. Time zones are still a problem. It is also much easier to consume than to create – in Oracle, wikis are already adopted, but blogs are only now being explored.

Of all of the people on the panel – Oracle, SAP, Sony – nobody is at all excited about videoconferencing. Confirms what I have thought for a long time – videoconferencing gets much more media attention (on account of being so sexy) than it pragmatically deserves.

I have been live mindmapping the session on MindMapping here. Later in the day I’ll try to upgrade to a pro account so I can actually embed it here, but for now, the MindMeister map is public.  MindMeister very generously made a gift a a pro membership to me… but WordPress flushes out the embed code when I try to place it here. If anyone has a solution, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Finnern told us the key to having a large number of community participants is to give out iPhones

The first question: where do we start? We are in a different place than we were; we’rea learning how social communities work. The rise of social web is driven by its utter simplicity – driving enormous growth. Most of the content is created by “us”, propelling the peer production model. The blogosphere is the biggest conversation in the world.

Self-formed communities – ex. KatrinaList. CafeMom is a sample of a real-people social network vs. SV network. Average people in an organization will not have time to adopt these tools. This is something that we have not yet found a solution for.

Problems: the 2% troublemakers; the 9x problems (new tools must be nearly 10 times better for people to have incentive to switch – Harvard research). Many are concerned that 2.0 will decrease productivity [and we're all so excited about how they increase productivity?].

Diane Davidson – found that when people say bad things, approaching them directly solved the problem. After some time, WebEx found people asking “can we do this in a community?”

Robert Duffy – Intel is opening up, looking at social media to make sure they keep being relevant. Participating not just internally but also going out to other places where discussions are going on as well.

Mark Finnern – finds that most of the growth on SAP’s communities for business processes consulting comes from word of mouth.

Josh Hilliker – when launching Intel vPro, wants to talk to the people within partner organizations who are bloggers passionate about silicon. Research is moving from talking to individuals in enterprises about what they want – to talking to the community as a whole.

Mike Walsh – talks about companies outside of the usual adopters (hi-tech industry) looking at online communities and obtaining great benefits?. [This is something that I am very interested in. Does anyone know of a company in the construction industry using enterprise 2.0?] Mike gives two interesting examples that I will have to look at: Dwell.com and Autodesk communities. I wonder

Comment from the audience: “Community can be a nice way of saying that we are shifting the burden of tech support unto our customers.” Diane sees it more as broadening of what gets done, a win-win situation. Offering joint ownership of our products [Apple, where are you?] Josh makes a good point that community is faster than support.

Audience asking for 5 tips on how a start-up can build a community. Answers:

• start with a great product
• one-on-one relationship
• listen and react so people feel heard
• hire your top contributors
• set your goals so people internally are on the same page
• find your greatest advocates
• market the community
• keep it open as much as possible (a minimum of private areas)
• reward people for providing good content and participating

What resources to allocate for launching a small community and growing it?

• do you want to build your own platform or buy? integrated or best-in-breed?
• WebEx had almost no resources internally
• need to find people internally who are willing to change the way they work
• Intel has a few positions of “Community Manager” (Josh’ position). Very very nice!
• Josh also makes the point that launching communities in Intel is very much like a start-up
• Intel has a goal of shifting the content to the community and ultimately spinning it off

Very nice panel, thanks to all the panelists!

Stephen Collins has an interesting point about the KW 2.0 being cross-generational. They wnnt to know how they can give and get value. This is perceived as a lack of loyalty – when it is in fact just looking for value. They will then walk out the door with a wealth of unshared information.

How to make sure they are engaged? Give them a community – let them collaborate will colleague. Need for awareness; these people love to share. People get demoralized at work when the effort they put in doesn’t get recognized. It is very important to have a Learning organization culture. Silos kill knowledge sharing – you need to kill walls. KW 2.0 dont’ have respect for authority: this derives from knowledge rather than power. Need to have management validate the new working style. The metrics around what you’re doing need to be changed: the output should count, not the number of hours they spend there.

Live notes

Killing off the idea that an app is selected by the IT group. The boundaries of a personal app vs. a company app is on its way out. Apps are dissapearing because you no longer think about the app itself, only about the things you’re trying to get done. Focusing on the end user. .. with each one being different in the way they accomplish their work. All the apps that are half-baked… they all need databases to run on. The economics of innovation have changed.

We have lots of little apps… will it continue? Will users have to integrate them? Or still the buy and consolidate platform?

If users don’t care about the app anymore, is it becoming a commodity?

We don’t really say it, but I see that everyone is wishing the IT department to be dead.

The New Platforms panel at Office 2.0 hammered home their idea that consumers will drive Office 2.0 adoption into the enterprise. The panel assumed that Web 2.0 platforms will be the standard for the enterprise, and the moderator called them all out on this. While this makes sense to me, I agree that is not necessarily the right assumption.

The panelists all agreed open standards are critical.

The conversation then gravitated to …. Facebook (shock!). From Facebook they have learned to keep the platform quite simple.

Allowing multi-vendor support through mash-ups allows the experts in a given component to enrich the user’s platforms.

Platforms that are adopted must solve a customer’s problem. While this is clear, simple, and obvious, firms must keep this in the forefront of their minds as they design their platforms and applications.

A couple of us are trying to get a community tag going at Office 2.0.  Hopefully, everyone blogging at the conference will start tagging with o2con07 (letter “o” at the beginng and number “0″ at the end).

You can subscribe to the Technorate feed at http://feeds.technorati.com/search/o2con07. 

It is day 2 of the Office 2.0 conference. It is fairly amazing that the entire conference is paperless and was organized and managed using on-line tools only. No desktop apps were used at all in any part of the organization of this conference. No documents exist on local hard drives or file servers – all are in the Web cloud. Ismael Ghalimi’s talk on the subject was illuminating. Look at this page to see the various on-line tools (18 of them!) he and the other organizers used. The only paper they accepted were checks (why pay the credit card feeds?).

First off to the Zoho bash at B near Moscone…

I’ll tell you what – for a freemium office suite, they sure throw a party together. I had great conversations with Ross from Nine Summer (he refreshingly gets the enterprisey, as he was CTO at Timex for 3 years), the folks from Spresent, and Tim from PlanHQ. I still think Ross and Tim need to connect to talk about PlanHQ.

I then dropped by the House of Shields for RedMonk Evening Services, courtesy of Steve. This was a cool, small get together – focus on quality not quantity. I had some interesting conversations on the analyst biz with folks from Bite Communications.

It’s refreshing to get to finally meet some people that you have been reading and blogging about for awhile, and hang out in a casual setting… and also pick up a few more subscriptions to follow. Thanks Zoho and RedMonk!

Technorati tags: zoho, redmonk, houseofshields, spresent, ninesummer, planhq,
o2con07

I have to say that I’m so far impressed with how much enterprisey concerns are being discussed at the Office 2.0 conference. Adam Carson had a fantastic “What is Enterprise 2.0?” presentation that jettisoned the Enterprise track into gear today. Adam discussed many of the topics that I had on my list, and did a fantastic job setting the tone of what it takes to evangelize 2.0 initiatives inside a large company – a regulated company, at that. He talked about having Regulatory people involved early as a key success factor – I’m not sure how many of the vendors out here are thinking that way, but they need to.

For my part (which you can see on the Office 2.0 video streaming page – click on the “On Demand Videos” tab, and then scroll to “The Web Practitioner”), I tried to talk more specifically about how to blend in collaborative interaction with compliance. Oftentimes the reason IT gets a bad rap is because that’s where compliance gets inserted. Like one of my fellow panelists commented – those are not the fun features (they just need to be there to be an enterprisey play).

Simon Revell and Scott Gavin of “Meet Charlie” fame walked through the story behind the far more interesting presentation – a case study of bringing Enterprise 2.0 to a large pharma. This is a fascinating story, and one I hope to copy to some extent… we’ll see how that goes.

Technorati tags: office2.0, conference, enterprisey,
o2con07

Still here at Office 2.0…

Is Social Computing just for kids? What happens when they grow-up? Will this change how we work? Is this changing already? The Social Computing panel which discussed this was quite interesting.

Firms and business people are already using Social Computing tools. Dove just setup a Ning group to discuss their products with their customers in Germany. People are using LinkedIn to get to know their coworkers better (do you really know what your coworkers did more than 6 months ago?) and to get to know people they are going into a meeting with. Plaxo is working to enable an Open Social Web with their new Pulse social networking feed. These are just some examples mentioned by the panelists.

The elephant the room was Facebook. There was a very interesting discussion about how the worlds of Facebook (for friends and family) and LinkedIn (for work) are starting to intersect. There were differing views on this… Should the networks be bridged or kept separate? Do you want your business friends to be part of the same group as your family and social friends? The social networks have not solved this yet, but all agreed that this is an issue and that this will be solved.

One thing mentioned that seems interesting is the Bill of Rights for the Social Web. I will read this later and comment on it then.

At the Office 2.0 conference, Adam Carson kicked off the Enterprise 2.0 track by asking and trying to answer this question – “in there social networking / Enterprise 2.0 for business?”.

Adam defines Enterprise 2.0 as bringing the concepts, tools, and technologies of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise. Web 2.0 is not Enterprise 2.0. You need to take Web 2.0, add permissioning, add human resources, add management strategy, add business use cases, and add the IT department, and you get Enterprise 2.0 Solutions… Bottom line, you need a lot of collaboration to get to Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

Your Enterprise 2.0 Framework does some interesting things:
(1) Connects the Enterprise to itself. You can use these tools to be more like a community
(2) Increased transparency & productivity. You can get better access / use of tools and applications. You can self-serve your IT
(3) Delivering the Enterprise to clients. You can do Enterprise-wide CRM, improve client communication, and external views.

How do get buy-in?
(1) Management Support
(2) Usability – should be dead simple
(3) Integration – into existing workflow and solutions. Cannot be a new thing, but an improvement to existing work patterns.
(4) Accessibility – allows easier seamless adoption
(5) Top Down – if managers are blogging, the staff will follow
(6) Training – not how but why and what’s different
(7) Templating – structure and refuse. Don’t start with a blank page each time.
(8) Solve Problems – make it easier for IT to allow adoption

What are the barriers and risks?
(1) Lack of management support
(2) Organizational and cultural resistance
(3) Adoption – needs to be 9x better to get adopted
(4) Legal / regulatory issues
(5) Funding / support
(6) Attention / time / priority
(7) Lack of willingness to experiment and potentially fail to learn and grow
(8) No “Long Tail” of users
(9) Trouble proving business value – how to prove ROI before you try…

Thanks Adam for great talk, and sorry for any errors I made lifting info from your slides and your talk!

Some quick thoughts on the very nice platform that Etelos has provided for Office 2.0:

• The profile asks for our blog RSS, but automatically puts an http:// in front of it, rendering it useless.
• If the blog RSS can be fixed, where can we watch everybody liveblogging during the conference?
• The business card replacement is absolutely marvelous. Yesterday, at the Unconference, I flinched every time I had to exchange business cards. However… where can I see a list of the people to whom I have sent my information? Edit: within a couple of hours, Etelos solved this.

Ah, the tyranny of bloggers. I’ll post more about the panel discussion on emerging economies on BusinessIdeas.ro.

At yesterday’s Unconference, I participated in the following discussions:

1. Introducing disruptive technologies
2. How can Office 2.0 vendors make money
3. Does the virtual enterprise really exist?
4. Enterprise 2.0 in emerging economies
5. Productivity in office 2.0

Interesting takeaways and further questions:

• Once a Web2.0 product “succeeds”, it quickly loses coolness (see graph). J. C. MacDonald said that once Groove sold out to Microsoft, it “feel off the cliff of coolness”. If coolness (“Whuffie“) is the currency of choice in the Web2.0 world, and monetary success quickly brings a coolness penalty, what are the long-term options for 2.0 business?
• Disruptiveness is relative. I fully agree with Neil Raden’s point that (paraphrasing) “disruptive” is a coward’s synonym for innovation.
• Dave Mosby raised the very interesting question of how to raise pain awareness. Self-protective denial keeps people sane (“We manage just fine with email!”). I look forward to exploring this question throughout the conference, maybe in the Culture and Technolgy panel later in the day.
• Robin Carey shared some very thought-provoking ideas on the way social media could be used in NGOs and for social issues reporting. I will certainly follow up on this theme, as I find it tremendously promising. This recent Economist article is a good introduction (also covered in more detail by the excellent Humanitarian.info).

By the way… Twitter is still down. Very bad timing for me, as I was looking forward to twitterring through the conference.

The first panel at the Office 2.0 conference is a discussion on the future of work. The panels are people from Microsoft (Excel team), Google (Apps team), SAP Labs, Intuit, Etelos, and GigaOmniMedia. Some key takeaways from their discussion:
- Collaboration is the key to the future office
- Innovation in the consumer space is moving faster than innovation in the enterprise space
- New tools being developed for the consumer are being brought into the office by the individual. IT teams are reacting the the innovation from the consumer space
- Customization for tools is a key without programming by end user – they build their own work flows, they choose their own content, and they use the information to make decisions.
- Small businesses will drive the innovation because they are not encumbered by the legacy enterprise and the large entrenched IT staff
- Data standards and open API’s enable a stable platform on which innovation can be performed

Office 2.0 has 600 people sitting in a room blogging, taking notes on their laptops, and working their new iPhones. It is amazing how the network was created and deployed on the fly by Covad and Swisscom. It is a test lab, and so far it is working fantastically. The entire conference is paper free and was created using Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 tools only. Participants are mass collaborating on their new iPhones, and interacting over Twitter, IM, etc…

Check out the paperless registration for Office 2.0:

The technology happening at the conference is amazing. A see of 24″ iMacs for demo pods and 40 wifi hotspots with 7MB download – w00t!

The iPhone has an iPhone-targeted web site to look up the agenda, browse attendees, and figure out where the free drinks are. The iPhone thing seems like a lot of hype, but it’s actually amazing to have everyone on the same platform. I have used it several times already to connect with colleagues. The USB drive has a Premium Edition of the ThinkFree suite on it.

All of the presentations are being streamed live, so if you have nothing else to do today at 3:30pm US Pacific time, then check out my panel discussion live!

Technorati tags: office2.0, conference, iphone, flashdrive, thinkfree, usb,
o2con07