It was a nice little conference, with 50 or so people attending.

After the general opening session, we had a demo presentation of Groupwise 8, Novell’s messaging solution. Some nice features in there !

We were also granted with a customer experience report from one of Novell’s Groupwise customer.

Then came Bruno Teyton of IDC which gave us a summary of IDC’s view on the economic perspectives for the next 4 or 5 years as well as how this would impact implementation of messaging and collaboration solutions. Of course, that was a bit grim, but overall, it wasn’t all that dark. There was some focus on messaging solutions as a cost reducing mean by achieving quick ROI. Long term prospects also put emphasis on reducing storage costs by deduplicating data.

After a quick snack, we were back for the afternoon session

IDC was back and gave us more prospects about the 2.0 world. That was probably the part I was the most waiting for. Again, the focus was more on the economic aspects of going 2.0 – with some strong emphasis on the actual management changes required. Overall, going to a 2.0 model seemed like the 2nd executives topmost priority (although I couldn’t get if this was from a global perspective or only for the large businesses). Some of the reasons given for that push was cost reduction (no surprise here) through use of telecommuting and remote communications – via instant messaging, webinars and videoconferencing. Other drives evoked were leveraging knowledge workers assets, being appealing to generation Y workers and increasing reactivity and turaround times – by somewhat shortening the chain of command.

Quite an interresting view on the state of affairs in that field, but – not to lessen IDC’s work on those analysis – it’s what they do anyway – I am personally always a bit cautious about the validity of long term prospects, especially in times like now when everything seems so volatile. Giving 5 years outlooks with 0.1 point accuracy seems a bit ambitious to me !

Novell then presented their own collaborative package – called Teaming and Conferencing. The “teaming” part is based on kablink and seems to offer quite a few nice features. It sports the basic handfull of traditional 2.0 tool facets : groups (or teams), blogs, wikis, tagging and profiles. It also contains some document workflow handling capabilities with a neat graphical workflow editor. They also presented the next version (still not released yet) which has a few additional featurettes and a slightly different look and feel.

The conferencing part was only briefly evoked – but it offers the usual web conferencing facilities.. Whiteboarding, application sharing, slide presenter, group chats, etc.. We didn’t get a demo of this one though !

We then had a presentation by a Novell partner who seemed pretty pleased at how easy it was to put the teaming part in production for one of their customer – managing to roll out within 2 weeks after the deal was made.

The day finished with some tapas and some wine tasting games to flush it all down !

I am not going to make any sort of comparison between the various 2.0 software packages at this point – not without having tested the whole bunch – and – this could take some time ! But Novell’s package did seem to me like a decent player in that market.

It’s taking me a whole lot more of time than I would have expected to get acquainted with the “2.0″ ways.

Of course (well.. it’s not *that* obvious), I’m kind of familiar with the concepts. Bertrand did initiate me quite thoroughly to the concept during endless hours of ‘live’ talks about it !

But getting to use twitter.. facebook (ok.. I’m staying clear of this one for the time being), linkedin, plaxo.. blogging (yes, I know.. that’s what I’m doing just now) – on a regular basis is *NOT* what I instinctively do.

I’m still an e-mail guy. Mailing lists.. oh yes !.. Newsgroups.. I read a few.. and post also once in a while.

But I find maintaining ‘web’ based communication more strainful than streamlined myself.

I always have my e-mail client open. So if I see something there that warrants (or maybe doesn’t) a reply, I’ll answer… To whoever is listening.

Using tools like twitter (again – I’m not denying it may be useful) is still like twisting my arm..

If I have something to say to a particular audience, I like this audience to be ‘identified’ (not necessarily by name though).. So just throwing out random ideas to a random crowd is still foreign to me.

..

But..

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I’m learning !