I'm totally impressed by the Office 2.0 conference and the quality of presenters, the understanding of the concept of what the 2.0, cloud based collaboration will bring to business in the near term.
With companies like BEA and Intuit showing their wares, and with companies like IBM, Oracle and CSC in the audience, you have to realize that the big money is looking at the space both to learn, and to likely avoid trial and error.
One of the interesting apps I saw was TimeBridge, a service that makes appointments easier to schedule, but as good as it was, a friend of a friend enlightened me about his new startup and I felt like TimeBridge was last years calendar compared to what's coming next. Another neat app was Zoho. While they are playing in a crowded space bridge by two elephants, Google and Microsoft, their you can use your Office docs and import and export approach resonated well with me. There were also a lot, and I mean a lot of "collaboration" platforms, all of which have somethings I like, and not all the elements I want or need in one place. The one thing they were all missing was:
a) Presence via existing IM tools
b) Voice
c) Video
Those apps are what collaboration needs to be real time...so while Office 2.0 was a hit, the promise won't be achieved until the collaboration tools are complete.
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