Susan Scrupski – Page 20

Atlassian’s Confluence 2.9 embraces “legacy work”

Making a deeper commitment to Microsoft, Atlassian acquired one of its community partners, Benryan Software and released its SharePoint Connector for Confluence 2.9. Additionally, the company incorporated over 150 user requests into the latest release and added 10 new production plugins. Benryan has a MS Office connector to Confluence (known fondly by existing users as the word/dav plug-in*) that makes it simple to import all Word Docs (in one to multiple pages), and to edit them in Confluence. You can also view Excel, PowerPoint, and Word docs within a Confluence wiki page and edit them. Also announced is the commercial release of its SharePoint connector. Some key features include the ability to embed Confluence content within SharePoint, bi-directional navigation (link SharePoint content within Confluence and vice versa), federated search (confluence searches reach into SharePoint), and security unification (immediate access: SharePoint permissions and unified security).

For a more detailed explanation of all the goodies in the new release, see @SarahinTampa‘s post on RWW, “Wiki Editing Just Got Easier: Atlassian Confluence Releases Office Connector.”

Jeff Walker, President of Atlassian, briefed a few of us bloggers last week on the announcement. What’s interesting to me is how the company framed the announcement in language like, “We are embracing the Microsoft and Outlook world.” Jeff explained how there are lots of folks out there in corporate America who are “comfortable with Office documents.” Well, true dat, homeboy. IMHO the more sensible we can make the transition for corporate America to 2.0 working, the better. I hope we’ll see more 2.0 startups embracing the legacy installed base of enterprise 1.0 workers and workware.

Check out the MS Office Connector:

*For existing users who have the word/dav plug-in, there have been some major improvements and bug fixes to the software that are appearing within 2.9. And now that it is an Atlassian plugin, it is fully supported by the company, as well. The newer version is completely free to existing customers with current licenses. Bad news? Firefox 3.0 is currently not supported, however the company expects to resolve the issue shortly.

How will we work 2.0 for the Man?

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m contributing to a large research project here at nGenera. The research is titled, “Redefining Employee Computing.” The genesis for the project began when one of our customers casually asked, “What would happen if we (IT) stopped supporting the end-user… and we simply only supported from the Corporate network in?” Of course I’m paraphrasing, but that was the basic idea. The notion generated a spirited discussion around the topic, resulting in the research project we’re now undertaking.

Here is the project description:

“End-user computing” remains a burdensome challenge in large corporations, and the assumptions underlying its management have become obsolete. So has the term itself. Today we’re no longer dealing with just computing, but with devices and capabilities for performing work, communicating and collaborating with others, and even orchestrating the “life” side of the work-life equation. And corporations are no longer dealing with a faceless “end user” served by a standard package of capabilities, but with a wide variety of diverse and demanding employees who bring their own technological abilities and preferences to the job, and ho have been trained as consumers to expect technology to be highly capable and easy to use.”

The research has taken us in some predictable and some surprising directions. Included in the study are two dozen well-recognized corporate giants, many of them global. Half are in the Fortune 100 (of those, 6 are in the top 50 and 3 in the top 10). Bob Morison, featured here in the video is a regular commentator for PBS’s Nightly Business Report. He discusses the generational challenges we’re surfacing in the research. If you are interested in seeing some early findings on this research, we’ll be presenting at Office 2.0.

Twitter ID your conference badge

Wouldn’t it be great if you could display your Twitter ID on your badge, so your Twitter friends & followers recognize you? I created a handy way to add my Twitter photo and ID to any conference badge. I simply took a screen shot of my ID and inserted it into a label form I found on the web. I then printed them on label paper.

I will take these Twitter labels with me to every conference, meetup, workshop, etc. that I attend and simply attach them to the conference-issued badge. Easy! And what a great conversation-starter for Twitter friends and fans, the Twitter-curious, or the Twitter-unenlightened.

A Round-up of Enterprise 2.0-related tidbits

Jive Clearspace has begun an open community where e2.0 fans, friends, and enemies (that means you Tom Davenport :-)) can have an opportunity to share war stories, successes, and get questions answered. The community site is called ClearStep. Of course, you can always share your opinions on our nGenera site, as well. Oliver Marks tipped me off to this site too by Imaginatik which appears to be powered by Ning, but there are some great wikinomics-style case studies and discussion threads there you might want to participate in.

Second, I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile. Nick Barker has created a one-stop shop for aggregating all current goings-on and content related to Enterprise 2.0 at his Enterprise 2.0 Portal site. The site is free and should be on everyone’s feed reader. Make sure you check it out.

And, in case you missed it, the venerable consulting institution, McKinsey & Co. published its global survey results for “Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise.” It’s also free, but you have to give them your contact info.

Finally, Niall Cook who founded one of my favorite products, Cogenz, (in his spare time) released his new book, “Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software will change the future of work.” I have not read it yet, but I’m certain it’s another must-have for your e2.0 bookshelf– IF you have a liberal expense account. It’s a little pricey at $89.95. I asked Niall about the price, he said it’s because the publisher sells mainly to an institutional and academic market. I’m hoping for a review copy, or will have to wait for the eBook or paperback version. Or maybe I can get a discount because Don Tapscott wrote the forward? (Humm… just realized we need to update Don’s profile on Wikipedia to reflect nGenera. Damn these Internets, always need to be current!). Actually, Niall may have taken a page out of the Wikinomics playbook, because it appears you can co-create with the community to add more content on each of the book’s chapters with this wiki hosted by Socialtext. He’s also blogging on the major themes of the book here.

Office 2.0 getting into gear

Yep. It’s that time again. The mad dash to put together a fabulous conference is underway. Ismael, Oliver Marks, and I are working hard to deliver a first-rate conference.

The web site should be up tomorrow here. Thanks again to Jive Clearspace for hosting the conference site. Today is the last day you can get the early bird discount ($1195 vs. $1495), so be sure to register before midnight Pacific time zone.

This year’s groovy gizmo giveaway will be the The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC or a Gigabyte M528 running Linux.

Much more will be coming on Office 2.0, as we lock in the details. Looking forward to seeing everyone in San Francisco!