The US West Coast Enterprise 2.0 Conference commences November 8, and has quickly reached the same number of attendees as the summer east coast Boston event within only two years.
I’ve previously discussed on this blog Richard Boly of the US state department, who will be presenting their iDiplomacy environment, and there is a good list of speakers around the business topic which has reached a critical mass in 2010 - enhanced enterprise collaboration and ’social’ interactions within business.
My ZDNet colleague Paul Greenberg chairs the Social CRM track, ably co chaired by Sovos Group’s Sameer Patel.
The German Enterprise Summit last week produced some interesting views, ideas and opinions from a more European perspective in a business space which worldwide means different things to different people depending on culture and experience both individually and collectively.
The November California Enterprise 2.0 Conference, divided into discrete tracks, is an excellent place to consider perspectives from various business disciplines and points of view, hear case histories from strategists and practitioners and discuss initiatives and roll outs. I’m the track chair for Human Resources for this edition and have written a white paper available here to accompany our live track sessions and to set some discussion points for the coming months.
I’m looking forward to healthy HR debate around ‘Common ‘Real World’ HR Problems’, ‘Elevating HR’s enterprise wide strategic role’, ‘Measurement analytics & metrics’ and ‘People, performance and their culture’ in various sessions, plus a main stage debate ‘Human Resources Meets Enterprise 2.0 and the Cloud’ moderated by Bill McNee.
Adding to the rich array of technology options now available in the Enterprise 2.0 space, several vendors are launching new products at the conference: Neudesic is introducing ‘Pulse: Business Communication, Evolved’, Interact Intranet intelligent intranet software launches into the US market, Sococo announce Team Space, an always-on group communication service for distributed teams, TicTacDo are announcing a business Social Productivity Service and Oxygen Cloud are revealing their Oxygen Stream which ‘enables users to follow, communicate and engage in collaborative projects through a unified activity stream’.
Rhomobile aim to start a new category of software: ‘MEAP 2.0′, a comprehensive, multi-pronged solution enabling enterprises of all sizes to utilize the power and productivity of web technologies and the cloud to develop, distribute, deploy and manage native smartphone applications and data to their mobile workforce, while Moxie Software are showcasing a release of their social enterprise software, Spaces, that ‘puts the company’s Knowledgebase at the center of the platform bridging the gap between Social CRM and enterprise 2.0′.
Some familiar players are adding new functionality to their products: NewsGator is unveiling two new modules News Stream for Social Sites 2010 and Idea Stream for Social Sites 2010, Traction Software will introduce action tracking that’s seamlessly integrated with Traction TeamPage and puts project management in the natural flow of work. Yammer, building on their private Twitter style service, will showcase its newest applications, Polls, Events, and Questions in various languages. SuccessFactors are showcasing their integration of Enterprise 2.0 launch pad winning product Cubetree while IBM are making a major announcement during the show.
These exhibitors and lots of other familiar faces in the space - Jive, SocialText, Microsoft Sharepoint, Lotus Connections, SocialCast, Saba and so on - provide a useful one stop tire kicking demo area, but the real value of the conference is in hearing ways to select and deploy relevant tools that are fit for your purpose. Listening to and interacting with real users at all levels of organizations discussing their objectives and how they reached them is an enterprise conference staple.
Enterprise 2.0 is reaching a level of maturity that enables strategic conversation about business goals and intersections with other enterprise technologies. The operational community management building and uptake models are sure to be extensively discussed from a number of different industry vertical perspectives.
The noisier social media business marketing world is starting to sort out its cost per impression pr and marketing ‘conversational’ models, but the sheer volume of unfiltered, scattered noise from those in companies responsible for marketing products (ironically sometimes including E2.0 technologies) still confuses the lay person trying to understand the operational benefits of business networks and knowledge connections. The Social CRM track should help those needing to differentiate these two worlds.
