The 2009 version of the Gilbane Boston conference was held last week. It was the second one I have attended and my first as a track coordinator (I designed the Collaboration and Social Software track and made it happen.) The event was well attended (c. 1100 people) and the number of sponsors and exhibitors was up significantly from last year’s Boston conference. Many of the sessions I attended offered valuable insights from speakers and audience members. All in all, I would label the conference a success.

The Collaboration and Social Software track sessions were designed to minimize formal presentation time and encourage open discussion between panelists and audience members instead. Each session focused on either a common collaboration challenge (collaborative content authoring, content sharing, fostering discussions, managing innovation) or on a specific technology offering (Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Google Wave.) The sessions that dealt with specific technologies produced more active discussion than those that probed general collaboration issues. I am not sure why that was the case, but the SharePoint and Wave sessions spawned the level of interactivity that I had hoped for in all the panels. The audience seemed a bit reticent to join in the others. Perhaps it took them a while to warm up (the SharePoint and Wave sessions were at the end of the track.)

Here are some other, high level observations from the entire Gilbane Boston 2009 conference:

Twitter: Last year (and at Gilbane San Francisco in June 2009) attendees were buzzing about Twitter, wondering what it was and how it could be used in a corporate setting. This year the word “Twitter” was hardly uttered at all, by presenters or attendees. Most audience members seemed to be fixated on their laptop or smartphone during the conference sessions, but the related tweet stream flow was light compared to other events I’ve attended this quarter. The online participation level of folks interested in content management seems to mirror their carbon form patterns. Most are content to listen and watch, while only a few ask questions or make comments. That is true across all audiences, of course, but it seemed especially pronounced at Gilbane Boston.

SharePoint 2010: This topic replaced Twitter as the ubiquitous term at Gilbane Boston. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “SharePoint” at the conference, I would be able to buy a significant stake in Microsoft! Every company I consulted with during the event was seeking to make SharePoint either their primary content management and collaboration platform, or a more important element in their technology mix. Expectations for what will be possible with SharePoint 2010 are very high. If Microsoft can deliver on their vision, they will gain tremendous share in the market; if not, SharePoint may well have seen its zenith. Everything that I have heard and seen suggests the former will occur.

Google Wave: This fledgling technology also generated substantial buzz at Gilbane Boston. The session on Wave was very well attended, especially considering that it was the next-to-last breakout of the conference. An informal poll of the session audience indicated that nearly half have established a Wave account. However, when asked if they used Wave regularly, only about 20% of the registered users responded affirmatively;. Actual participation in the Wave that I created for attendees to take notes and discuss the Collaboration track online underscored the poll results. Most session attendees said they see the potential to collaborate differently, and more effectively and efficiently, in Wave, but cited many obstacles that were preventing them from doing so at this time. Audience members agree that the Wave user experience has a long way to go; functionality is missing and the user interface and features that are there are not easy to use. Most attendees thought Wave’s current shortcomings would be improved or eliminated entirely as they product matures. However, many also noted that collaboration norms within their organization would have to change before Wave is heavily adopted.

Open Source: This was the hot topic of the conference. Everyone was discussing open source content management and collaboration software. An informal poll of the audience at the opening keynote panel suggested that about 40% were using open source content management software. Many of the other attendees wanted to learn more about open source alternatives to the proprietary software they have been using. Clients that I met with asked questions about feature availability, ease of use, cost benefits, and financial viability of providers of open source content management and collaboration software. It was clear that open source is now considered a viable, and perhaps desirable, option by most organizations purchasing enterprise software.

My big take-away from Gilbane Boston 2009 is that we are experiencing an inflection point in the markets for enterprise content management and collaboration software. Monolithic, rigid, proprietary solutions are falling out of favor and interest in more lightweight, flexible, social, open source offerings is rapidly growing. I expect that this trend will continue to manifest itself at Gilbane San Francisco in June 2010, and beyond.

A business enterprise is really nothing more than a large community. The organization, like any healthy community, is formed around a clear, common purpose and actively works to create specific outcomes. If that purpose is forgotten or becomes irrelevant, the company will slowly decay and, ultimately, fail.

The implication of this observation is that corporate managers must function like community managers — connecting people and facilitating conversations — if the organization is to successfully address its mission.

Salesforce.com today announced “a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform”, called Chatter. While it will not be available until an unspecified date in 2010, Chatter will likely raise the bar for Enterprise 2.0 software, because of the promised ability to embed its functionality into other enterprise applications.

Chatter includes many of the social components that are the core of existing Enterprise 2.0 software offerings: Profiles, Status Updates, Feeds, Groups (Communities), etc. What is different — and significant — about Chatter is that any of those components can be integrated inside any existing enterprise application, including Salesforce CRM and the 135,000 custom applications built on the Force.com platform. In short, Salesforce.com will not make users collaborate through the Chatter interface; they will be able to leverage Chatter’s social functionality in the context of work that they are doing inside a CRM, ERP, or other enterprise system.

The ability to deploy social functionality as a service within an existing (or new) enterprise application is a game changer. To-date, only one other E2.0 software vendor that I am aware of (MindTouch) has been able to make that claim. Salesforce.com is the first proprietary software provider with a very large set of enterprise customers and third-party developers to offer social functionality as building blocks (services) that can be consumed in other, independent applications.

The Enterprise 2.0 crowd has been focused on adoption in 2009 and has recently begun to realize that integration of social functionality into existing and new enterprise applications and platforms will be key to increasing adoption (see my previous posts on this topic: Thought of the Day: September 17, 2009 and The Impending Enterprise 2.0 Software Market Consolidation). Salesforce.com’s announcement of Chatter begins to make that vision a reality, and at scale.

Two other aspects of Chatter demand attention. First, at a time when established Enterprise 2.0 software vendors are touting their ability to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint (see my previous post, Integration of Social Software and Content Management Systems: The Big Picture), Salesforce.com has chosen to provide integration with Google Apps instead. Salesforce.com will use the Google Data APIs to enable data communication between Chatter and Google Apps. This is hardly a surprise, given that cloud computing is core to both companies.

The other striking aspect of Chatter is its embrace of popular consumer social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. This occurs at a time when many organizations are blocking employee access to those tools for security, privacy, and productivity reasons. Salesforce.com already features bi-directional communication between its Force.com platform and Facebook, having launched the Force.com for Facebook developer toolkit a year ago. Now Salesforce.com is providing a similar developer toolkit for Twitter.

Chatter is an announced offering, not a shipping product. As such, it is already being compared to Google Wave in the collaboration market. However, Chatter is much more likely to make a significant impact in the E2.0 space, because Salesforce.com has always been focused on enterprise customers, while Google’s offerings started as consumer products and have only recently begun to slowly gain traction within enterprises. Google may bring Wave out of beta before Salesforce.com launches Chatter, but I expect that will make little difference as to which one sees better enterprise adoption in 2010. It is very likely that more organizations will understand Chatter’s value proposition of easily integrated social functionality.

Talk about a trip down memory lane…  Another excellent blog post yesterday by my friend and fellow Babson College alum, Sameer Patel, snapped me back a few years and gave me that spine tingling sense of deja vu.

Sameer wrote about how the market for Enterprise 2.0 software may evolve much the same way the enterprise portal software market did nearly a decade ago. I remember the consolidation of the portal market very well, having actively shaped and tracked it daily as an analyst and consultant. I would be thrilled if the E2.0 software market followed a similar, but somewhat different direction that the portal market took. Allow me to explain.

When the portal market consolidated in 2002-2003, some cash-starved vendors simply went out of business. However, many others were acquired for their technology, which was then integrated into other enterprise software offerings. Portal code became the UI layer of many enterprise software applications and was also used as a data and information aggregation and personalization method in those applications.

I believe that much of the functionality we see in Enterprise 2.0 software today will eventually be integrated into other enterprise applications. In fact, I would not be surprised to see that beginning to happen in 2010, as the effects of the recession continue to gnaw at the business climate, making it more difficult for many vendors of stand-alone E2.0 software tools and applications to survive, much less grow.

I hope that the difference between the historical integration of portal technology and the coming integration of E2.0 functionality is one of method. Portal functionality was embedded directly into the code of existing enterprise applications. Enterprise 2.0 functionality should be integrated into other applications as services (see my previous post on this subject.) Service-based functionality offers the advantage of writing once and using many times.  For example, creating service-based enterprise micro-messaging functionality (e.g. Yammer, Socialcast, Socialtext Signals, etc.) would allow it to be integrated into multiple, existing enterprise applications, rather than being confined to an Enterprise 2.0 software application or suite.

The primary goals of writing and deploying social software functionality as services are: 1) to allow enterprise software users to interact with one another without leaving the context in which they are already working, and 2) to preserve the organization’s investment in existing enterprise applications. The first is important from a user productivity and satisfaction standpoint, the second because of its financial benefit.

When the Enterprise 2.0 software market does consolidate, the remaining vendors will be there because they were able to create and sell:

• a platform that could be extended by developers creating custom solutions for large organizations,
• a suite that provided a robust, fixed set of functionality that met the common needs of many customers, or
• a single piece or multiple types of service-based functionality that could be integrated into either other enterprise application vendors’ offerings or deploying organizations’ existing applications and new mashups

What do you think? Will history repeat itself or will the list of Enterprise 2.0 software vendors that survived the impending, inevitable market consolidation consist primarily of those that embraced the service-based functionality model?

Defrag will be taking place November 11-12, in Denver. The conference is unusual in its focus — “accelerating the ‘aha’ moment”. The event brings together people from a number of technology domains, mixes them well, and incubates interesting ideas about high-level technology trends, patterns, practices, applications, and tools. It is a conference that I have been interested in attending, but have never made it. Thankfully, that is about to change.

I will be at Defrag this year, not only as an attendee, but also as a Discussion Catalyst. A what?! Well, essentially, my job will be to facilitate discussion on four divergent, yet related, points of view regarding a single topic. The session that I am leading is on Sharing, Markets, and People. The table below lists the presenters and their points of view on the topic.

Following this series of ten minute presentations, I will facilitate a discussion with the entire audience that examines commonality and conflict between the ideas expressed by the presenter. Think of it as moderating a panel where the entire audience is on stage and actively participating. Fun!

The session should be great, and I am really looking forward to the entire conference. If you are not yet committed to attending Defrag, you should seriously consider doing so. You can still register here. If you will be attending, please be sure to say hello while we are together in Denver for a couple of intellectually stimulating days!