This was the theme for the 4th annual Gilbane Conference held at the San Francisco Westin on June 18-20th. I was able to attend for one day, the 19th and mostly to hear the discussions run by Geoff Bock who is the Gilbane analyst on collaboration.

The first session Geoff ran was called “Case Studies: Collaboration in Action.” This consisted of a panel of three organizations that had implemented online communities (for various reasons).

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Some of you many on even know what a codec is or why it is important to collaboration. A codec is a piece of software that does both encoding and decoding of a data stream. Codecs are most often found in both the video conferencing and audio conferencing world. For many of the collaboration tools you commonly use today you may not even be aware of the codec involved as many vendors OEM this piece of software rather than build it (smart move). On2 has one of the more popular codecs and Facebook, Sony, and Texas Instruments all use it. Global IP Solutions or (GIPS) offers both video and audio (VoIP) codecs that are used by many other vendors (Radvision, Sony-Ericsson uses it for their Smartphones, Yahoo! and even IBM uses it in their SameTime product).

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Project tools were initially built for large linear projects and for the people managing those projects. However today, most people that manage projects are not professional project managers and many people have begun to realize that projects are often anything but linear. In addition most project management tools do not support the interactions of people on the project with either project objects (schedules, Gantt charts, presentations, diagrams, documents, etc.) or with other people. However, with the advent of the Internet and now Web 2.0 the focus has turned from content to interpersonal interactions through online communities and social networks. This blog is an overview of how these new Web 2.0 (social) technologies are helping project management evolve, and be more effective.

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As Boston sweltered, Aegeon Software’s President (I think, since his card bears no title), Gary Lang, asked if he and his colleague could sit at the lunch table where I sat in air-conditioned comfort at the buzzing Enterprise 2.0 show at the new Waterfront Westin last week. Lang seemed almost shy at first, apologizing for crowding me. Then, noticing my badge, politely confirmed I was an analyst and asked, “what would a company have to do to get you to cover our product.” I guess the answer is, sit next to me at lunch.  (Oh, and have an interesting product.)

Aegeon--Australia-based (but with a US base in Mission Viejo, CA)--and its product, Spaceo.us, a very interesting social collaboration platform, was a finalist in the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad for new products (it lost out to Veodia, an enterprise web-broadcast application), touts its product as first tool that wraps Web 2.0 capabilities around existing enterprise applications to create an integrated, collaboration-ready suite.

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I was at the Google I/O developer’s conference yesterday and saw Android (Google's new mobile software stack) on a new mobile device in one of the demos at the keynote sessions. This is wherer I go off into gadget land, so all of you looking for the connection to collaboration will have to wait until the end of the blog.

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