Office 2.0 Conference, San Francisco

I just spent the last two days (Oct 11-12) at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. I learned about the event from a friend of mine, Mike McDerment, who was speaking at the event about his new web based invoicing application, Freshbooks. This was the enterprise follow-up to the consumer driven Web 2.0 mesh conference held in May 2006 in Toronto. As a web/office 2.0 enthusiast, I was excited to spend time with some of the leading minds of this movement.

This is new territory. There is no consensus on what the future of Office 2.0 will look like, or whether we will ever get there. In many ways, it feels like we are on the brink of something very profound, yet many question marks remain.

The core principle of Office 2.0 revolves around how users collaborate with one another in an enterprise. Sending documents via email is considered "Office 1.0", while working collaboratively with colleagues on the same documents across multiple offices is what the Office 2.0 movement is all about.

Office 2.0 principles are guiding the productivity gains at rightsleeve.com. We have developed a powerful web based solution to power all of our work flow, CRM and supply chain management. It was not an easy process, but we pushed our development team hard to create something that would eliminate the paper flows, increase transparency and ultimately allow our staff to collaborate easily with one another.

Web 2.0 apps will also power the front end of our web business, ultimately benefiting clients. We have always seen our clients as partners in our success. We are looking to the web to connect clients with each other and the products they order – more on this as we roll out the features over the next few months.

Some of the memorable moments of the conference included:

- Attending the conference during the week of two major Google announcements: (i) the You Tube purchase for $1.65BN and (ii) the launch of Google Docs and Spreadsheets

- Being reminded of one of the principal obstacles to widespread Office 2.0 adoption – broadband and connectivity issues. (network issues repeatedly slowed down demo presentations and Gmail even failed once for a stressed out presenter demonstrating a mashup).
- Innovative office 2.0 applications: Joyent, Zoho, Wufoo, SugarCRM, Koral, Genius

- Andrew McAfee’s keynote address on Enterprise 2.0 (he has written what has become the academic standard on this new phenomenon)

- Esther Dyson’s somewhat luke warm endorsement of Office 2.0. I thought it was an interesting way to start a forward thinking web conference with a leading tech advocate who admitted she was more Office 0.9 than Office 2.0 (well, at least she was honest).

I was very impressed with the conference organizer, Ishmael Galimi, who whipped together this conference after evangelizing the concept in his blog earlier in the year. His philosophy (expounded on his blog IT Redux) about the move from desktop installed software to hosted web applications spurred much debate before and during the conference. It was pretty impressive that he and his team were able to assemble such a strong line of speakers and vendors in such a short period of time.