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Office 2.0 - Worlds coolest conference!

I will be participating on a panel on Mindmapping at the Office 2.0 Conference next week (September 5-7 in San Fran).

What’s awesomely cool about the Office 2.0 Conference this year (besides the Mindmapping panel, of course) is Ismael Ghalimi (conference producer and CEO of Intalio) idea to give every participant at Conference will receive a shiny new iPhone.

Why? Other than just being a cool idea, the Office 2.0 Conference will be a “collective experiment aimed at discovering the future of mobile productivity & collaboration. In such a context, equipping over 500 people with the exact same mobile device will allow us to learn a lot about user interfaces, workflows, and usage patterns for mobile online applications. In essence, this upcoming edition of the Office 2.0 Conference will quickly turn into one of the largest experiments on mobile productivity & collaboration ever attempted. Quite frankly, it should be a lot of fun.”

A brief critique of Burton Groups “Google Apps in the Enterprise”

Let me start by saying that the responsible position for author Guy Creese to take would have been much closer to LimitNone’s white paper entitled “Google and Microsoft: Living together in harmony”, because most organizations have a lot to gain by mixing the two environments. But that would not have garnered nearly the same amount of attention as pitting Microsoft against Google and taking every opportunity to point out why a Google solution could be a “career-limiting” move.

The real differences between Microsoft Office and Google Apps is best shown in this graphic. And this is what Mr. Creese fails to recognize - Google Apps is a very different beast than Microsoft Office and addresses a very different need. Comparing the two as though one was a replacement for the other is completely meaningless.

There are a couple of minor errors in the report:

• He states that “It is worth noting that developers cannot programmatically create a new spreadsheet.” We do this quite easily in gSHARE for Excel.
• He refers to “Google Works”, by which I assume he means “Google Gears“.

There are also some odd comments, like:

• Not having an offline capability may “marginalize employees who do not have a connection at home”. Which century are we in? My 85 year-old mother-in-law has an internet connection at home.
• It is “Difficult to Plan for Product Capabilities and Rollouts”. This is true if you roll out a new version every 4-5 years (think MS Office). But incremental changes to this type of software is hardly an issue. We are not talking mission-critical software here.

All in all, I think this could have been a very useful document for anyone considering Google Apps, if only the title (and gist) had been: “How Enterprise Architects can leverage Google Apps in the Enterprise and thereby boost their careers.”