Collaboration is proving to be more than a buzzword

The focus of the conference was Collaboration and this year we saw more successful case studies than flashy presentations. The expo floor was crowded with vendors big and small offering solutions for a new collaborative workspace.

The biggest players made important product announcements: IBM announced Lotus Quickr 8.5, Microsoft's keynote presentation was used mainly to show their video blogging system and Novell presented demos on three collaboration products including Pulse, with simultaneous document editing as well as Conferencing and Teaming solutions.

Specialty vendors also made a splash: Jive presented a new filtering feature, Socialtext announced the release of Socialtext Connect beta, a new layer in the company's enterprise architecture.

Developing a solid business case remains elusive

There was much discussion this year about the elements for building a solid business case for collaboration tools, mainly in the breakout sessions. Keynote sessions, however, were a different story with speakers still talking about adoption as the key metric for success.

Christian Finn on his keynote session shared Microsoft's internal trial for their new video blogging add-on, highlighting the fact that the company reached a million views for podcasts. These numbers are very impressive so kudos to Microsoft for achieving that adoption rate. I'd have liked to see, however, additional metrics to understand how this tool will impact the way people work and how they share information. Their experience with this internal trial, however, is very relevant for those organizations that are interested in best practices for driving the adoption of new technologies for the enterprise.

There were other sessions that addressed the issue of metrics and adoption in detail, I will get back to my notes and elaborate on these topics in additional posts.

Facebook for the Enterprise is here to stay

The expo floor was crowded with vendors many of which seem to be offering solutions with a very similar look and feel. It is difficult to identify what differentiates these vendors but this is a relevant topic that I will try to tackle in a separate post. It does seem, however, that this is a trend that is not going away and with many companies already adopting it; Jive for example, has many interesting case studies in their home page and a very impressive list of customers. This is definitely a trend that we need to keep an eye on, Tony Zingale of Jive hit the nail on the head in his keynote session when he said that "when technology is not social it is a wasted opportunity".

Organizational challenges remain

There was big piece of the puzzle missing in this conference; which is the actual organizational challenges that organizations face. I believe this might be a question of building the marketing message, but despite the fact that we constantly heard about the real challenges the enterprise faces such as "e mail addiction" and "breaking the silos" by listening to the presentations you'd think that by introducing a new technology, workers will automatically be able to overcome this challenges.

Somewhere along the line, we lost track of the fact for effective change management, we have to deal with people and processes first, then find the technology that will support them.