Last week, I was in San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference. <span class="jive-body-profile-padding">Ismael Ghalimi, the guy behind the whole thing, pulled an amazing conference off in eight weeks. He chose Clearspace to power the conference site , the first use of our product to power an event and (given how fast things were moving) he launched the conference's site a day after setting Clearspace up. As always, he was open about what that process was like and what he learned. From the website's perspective, a little more time would have been great. In the meantime, everyone at the conference was blown away by what Ismael was able to pull off.
On the lighter side, attendees who stayed at the conference's hotel were greeted by what looked like the USA Today delivered to their room but was really us having a little Onion-style fun.
I participated in an Enterprise Collaboration panel with SAP, Oracle, BEA, Zimbra and Sony. It was a bit high-level but I tried to reinforce the importance of keeping collaboration focused on productivity. You can watch the video of it and the rest of the conference thanks to coverage by Veodia.
We also participated in the demo tracks. Ismael asked that we have our customers demo our software so we invited Intel and Attensa who both gave great demos of how they're using Clearspace and Clearspace X. Check out the video of Attensa's presentation (slides above) on how they're using Clearspace internally and the sort of impact it's made to their company (like the 31% reduction in email). Intel's video does an excellent job articulating their goals and the short term impact Clearspace X has had for them.
The best part of the conference was how many of the discussions recognized the need for true enterprise-class collaboration software that recognized the needs, challenges and reality-based technical environment that large companies deal with everyday. I remember one person at our booth saying, "you mean you make 'real' software that companies can actually use behind their firewall?!"
</span>Today, Intel launched Open Port, Intel's "first public online community," a site dedicated to direct communication between Intel's product & technology experts and the IT community. The video below does a better job than we could in explaining what the community is all about. One of the many quotes I liked was
"To talk to your end user is a must. The longer it takes to make that connection the more you become disconnected from your end user and what they need and want."
Intel shows the right leadership in welcoming a myriad of views and opinions as well as their plan to engage deeply with their community. The site officially launches next week. Be sure to check it out!