Simon Barratt

Collaborative Technologies Conference 2005 Summary

Overall, the inaugural Collaborative Technologies Conference was a good (not great) conference.  The organisation was good, though not sure why all the sessions seemed to start late.  The food was great (sausages and eggs for breakfast has to rate as the best breakfast offering ever for a conference!).  The location was superb and the weather was awesome!

The opening sessions on Monday and Tuesday were very good, with some insightful observations coming from Tom Malone and James Surowiecki.  Other sessions ranged from interesting new concepts and ideas to a confirmation of what we are already doing in FMC, to discussing tools as if they are new, that we have been using for a while now.

Everyone appeared to be pushing 'presence'.  We have been embedding presence awareness in applications for a while now and certainly see the benefit of doing so.  But to hear some of the people here, you would think that this is something new!  I believe that companies who have been following the Lotus strategy, are (or will be) finding themselves slightly ahead of the curve in this space.  The other vendors are working hard and catching up, so there is probably a real opportunity to gain some competitive advantage if you move quickly.  'Presence' is an important technology which will grow in scope as more and more presence generating systems become integrated.  Most people think the integration of the desktop with the phone system will the obvious candidate to go after.  Justifying a VoIP implementation, just to leverage presence may be a tough sell, but as PBX's come to the end of their natural life and VoIP based replacements come in, we will begin to see more examples of the two systems becoming integrated.

I was surprised that IBM did not make more of an effort for this conference.  They had two people talking in two of the sessions (for a total of 15 minutes), but no booth or other obvious presence (excuse the pun!)

Buzz words: Wikis, blogs, RSS, VoIP, Skype, del.icio.us, flickr, Convergrence, Presence, Social Software, Virtual Teams and my personal favourite "Social Capital"

There was not much to see at the booths.  A lot of web conference vendors (WebEx, RainDance, Microsoft etc.) and VoIP providers and hosted collaborative web spaces.

I'm sure there is more to add, but it is not coming to me at the moment!