Enterprise 2.0: the good and the bad

After four and a half days, twenty meetings, one heat wave and lots of hot tea (too much A/C), the second Enterprise 2.0 show is over. It’s a lot to cram into a summary-style blog post but here it goes:

What was interesting (mostly chronological and certainly not comprehensive):

• Microsoft vs. IBM demo-duel on Monday and the buzz that carried through the week about it (people were still asking me today what I thought). General consensus? IBM knocked it out of the park but it probably doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things.
• IBM’s indication that it will include full RSS feed aggregation technology in the next version of Lotus Connections — not the 2.0 version that is just now shipping but the one that is likely to ship at this time next year. Discussions on the show floor last night with some IBM folks lead me to believe there is still some uncertainty as to what this actually means but Jeff Schick, IBM Vice President, Social Computing Software told me in a one-on-one meeting yesterday that IBM will go full-bore into feed aggregation in the next release.
• Demo of NewsGator Social Sites. I’ve seen this before but it was interesting to see it on Monday afternoon, just hours after the Microsoft folks gave what can only be described as a weak SharePoint demo. Why didn’t they show Social Sites, since they included other partner technologies?
• Discussion with Rob Curry of the Microsoft SharePoint team. He noted that for the next version of SharePoint (expected late in 2009 as part of Office 14), they doubled the development teams on ECM and social software. I told him I thought feed aggregation and wikis are the most obvious areas in need of major advancement in SharePoint and he would only say I would be ‘pleased’ with the next release.
• Meeting with Tom Jenkins, Chief Strategy Officer at Open Text. Open Text had a big presence at the conference this year, an indication of the degree to which it has re-entered the collaboration market after several years of near exclusive focus on archiving, records management and compliance. What this means for the company’s SharePoint integration strategy remains to be seen.
• Jabs traded by Sam Lawrence of Jive Software and Lawrence Liu, SharePoint Technical Product Manager at Microsoft on a panel yesterday about social computing platforms. The content itself wasn’t all that interesting but at least Sam added some humor and Lawrence is an eminently good sport.
• Catch-up meeting with Atlassian and a discussion of how Confluence, JIRA and Atlassian’s other developer tools tie to a single sales strategy to technical teams. This was followed in the general ballroom by a session given by Ned Lerner from Sony Computer Entertainment, which showed, among other things, how core Confluence and JIRA are in their game development processes.
• Socialtext SocialCalc — this is interesting though I haven’t yet had a chance to view the demo.
• Open source panel this morning.

What wasn’t:

• Too much discussion of cultural change, barriers to adoption and best practices. These are all useful and much-needed topics, don’t get me wrong. But most of the sessions I joined on Tuesday and Wednesday were variations on these themes. I didn’t go to all of them to be sure, but I went to more than a few and seemed to be hearing much of the same content over and over. As Vishy put it: “If anybody says viral one more time I’m gonna sneeze.”
• I was hoping for more discussion on integration strategies, platforms vs. point tools, profiles / identity management, standards, deployment in customer-facing environments and so forth. A layer or two deeper I guess than most of the sessions went. Maybe next year we’ll all be more able to have those conversations.
• And speaking of next year, there were too many demos and vendor pitches this year that were extremely similar. How many will return next year? Or the year after? For that matter, for how many years will there be an “enterprise 2.0” conference before this stuff just becomes everyday?
• Most of the more technical sessions were held today, Thursday the final half day of the conference after many folks were gone.
• Like last year, most of the sessions were way too crowded with every seat filled. That’s a good thing for the vendors and the conference organizers, but not too comfortable or enjoyable for those in attendance.

That makes a longer list of things that were worthwhile than those that weren’t, making it, I would say, a well spent week. And there were lots of great hallway chats and opportunities to catch up. To anyone I was supposed to meet at some point and did not, please leave a comment or contact me directly.