Office 2.0 pioneers

20 September 2007

Good news and bad news for developers in the internet-based Office 2.0 space. The good news is that blue chip companies like Pfizer and Morgan Stanley are turning social networking, blogging, wikis and all the other paraphernalia of the web 2.0 world into real business tools.

The bad news? Well, as you'd expect from technologies that break the mould, they didn't exactly adopt them in standard ways - which suggests that selling services in this space could be harder than it looks.

The Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this month demonstrated that it's not just the whacky techies in Silicon Valley who are looking for the business angle hidden in the MySpace, YouTube and Facebook phenomena. A host of developers - from industry giants like Google to a wide variety of start-ups - are trying to build user-friendly web-based tools to help companies communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Compared to last year's conference - where vendors, media, analysts and bloggers vastly outnumbered the people who actually use this stuff - this year saw some fairly meaty companies get up on stage to talk about their experiences. They included Simon Revell and Scott Gavin, two 'average' Pfizer employees who have been pioneering adoption of Web-based tools at the pharmaceutical giant, and Adam Carson from Morgan Stanley. As representatives of large corporates operating in highly-regulated industries, their presence alone was a big endorsement for the concept of Office 2.0.

The Pfizer experience demonstrates, however, that adoption of Office 2.0 (often called Enterprise 2.0) services can be slightly anarchic - so if you're expecting to pitch your services to the head of IT, you might want to think again. Revell himself was the driving force for much of the adoption of IT at Pfizer, telling the conference that he was driven by frustration at the way businesses communicate - endless meetings, waiting for discussions with your boss, that sort of thing. After attending a Web conference in Edinburgh and posting his findings online, he received such a good response through viral distribution that he and Gavin set up a blog. It now gets 400,000 hits and is, he says, a hotbed of ideas - and visible enough to senior management for the pair to get funding for further Enterprise 2.0 work.

Revell and Gavin are now evangelists for using blogs, corporate wikis (collaborative websites that are often used for preparing internal documentation) and business versions of services like del.icio.us, which helps consumers share knowledge by bookmarking web pages they've viewed and tagging them with descriptions. They also put their faith in business-based social networks such as Linkedin. You can see more from their cult slideshow, Meet Charlie, which describes how a fictional hero goes from using classic Microsoft desktop applications like Word and Excel to hosted services such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Carson, meanwhile, had some words of caution for developers thinking of betting their shirts on the 2.0 space. With 70-80 Enterprise 2.0 projects underway at the financial services company, he pointed out that questions would inevitably be asked about whether start-ups could support Morgan Stanley going forward, compared to its long-track record with vendors like Microsoft. And he also listed a host of issues users have to chew over before making a decision about new technologies - from the obvious security implications to classic debates about build versus buy and the merits of best-of-breed applications versus suites. From that perspective, even if the sales process differs in terms of how you open the door to a big corporate, it seems that many of the objections you'll encounter will be painfully familiar.

By Keith Rodgers